What Long Hours Really Mean
wearemammoth.com
wearemammoth.com
Commuting is a different problem.
I don't know how the 35 hour work week in France is working out but I feel that they are the anomaly and could just as easily swing back to 39/40 hrs.
In the 8 hours for 'free time', a lot is taken up by chores etc.
I totally agree that working less makes more sense - although we are much more productive, this has not gone into working less, or even paying people more (except those at the top).
Why not allocate more time for sleep or activities? Why not work more (not all people hate working).
Seems like we could come up with a bunch of other arbitrary decisions that would make just as much sense if they were already a part of our culture for the last 100 years.
[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
If true - that's really interesting. I wonder what the other outcomes / configurations were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg_Company
Thye found (in the 1930s) that the reduced work week paid for itself in reduced workplace accidents. However, after WW2 companies moved to employer-paid accident insurance instead of paying out-of-pocket workman's comp, and as a result, the cost savings would be socialized anyway. This tilted the equation back toward an 8-hour day, at least from management's perspective, though employees remained staunchly opposed to the longer day for a generation.
What ultimately killed it was a status thing: by the 70s and 80s, employees on the 30-hour work week felt like they were "slackers", and didn't have the same social status as those who worked harder.
After the commute I have to walk 10 minutes, to arrive at my front door. I have to walk through a little park. Really. For me commuting and then walking is my way of coming down. Of letting go of the work, so that I arrive at home free of all the stuff, that happens in front of my two screens.
But that is just anecdotal evidence - and it might just work for me.
But on the topic, I would add one point: Regularly working more than the paid 8 hours might show another thing: You just are not fit for the work you do. You are not good enough, as you cannot get it done in 8 hours.
By the way is that a signal that you send to your boss, if you work longer regularly.
The only problem is that having got used to this I'd be very reluctant to take a job that I could walk or cycle to - which is a bit limiting.
I did used to cycle ~10 miles to work, which was far better exercise. Unfortunately my employer doesn't want to relocate to a convenient distance just for me.... :-)
(but I also willingly increase the commute time by picking a „wrong” train station, to have a longer cycling leg of the commute)
I feel like the big difference is the expectations of others placed on me. When I had to commute to the office, I was doing it for someone else. Others wanted me there certain days, at certain times, and it becomes a dash to meeting their expectations. That was the most draining part of the entire job. On the farm, I'm doing it for myself. I want to go because it is what I want to do.
Driving itself isn't that bad. I spent nine hours in the tractor and another hour on the road yesterday and while I was certainly tired and beat up, I felt a certain euphoria of accomplishment.
This word always makes me coil. Everytime I hear it - I assume someone is trying to sell me something.
The length of the work day/ work week is fairly arbitrary and definitely up for debate, there are great arguments that actually a three day working week would make far more sense [1].
Imo describing a simple convention in terms of deserve discourages debate and so should be avoided. Something broader such as `a human being deserves not to have to work every waking hour to live` would have been more acceptable as it separates the underlying principle from arbitrary conventions.
You buying yet?
More on-topic, I once mentioned to a European colleague my company's policy of giving employees four weeks of vacation once they've been here for five years. It took some convincing for him to understand that those employees did not get that extra four weeks of paid vacation as their PTO balance every year thereafter.
I hate cherry picking arguments presented as though they mean something.
"[...]deserves an average of 8 hours of work[...]"
"[...]2 days a week free[...]"
I think that's the snake oil you're smelling.
How does society ensure this can happen? With laws, of course! Why, we can just make overtime and >5 in every 7 days with worked hours illegal, it's so simple...
"It is a criminal offense to have unreasonable expectations of this law."
Or did you mean "the law" as in the institution?
(Also, to check, you didn't read my sarcasm as sincerity, right?)
That said, I meant "the law" as in the institution, not individual laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...
Also, a single number will be misleading. France has fewer immigrants and thus a different cultural structure. It also has very different neighbors and trade partners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...
"I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything." -- The Wire, Season 5
Now, I very much believe in the spirit of the concept. Bertrand Russell hit the nail:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
But through legislation, no. It needs to be a culturally grown movement.
Also, the US has a higher Human Development Index rating than France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...
and on whatever the Legatum Prosperity Index is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legatum_Prosperity_Index
and Germany's OECD's Better Life Index (using the "weigh all of these equally" measure): http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#11111111111
I would argue that standard of living is higher in the US.
http://news.yahoo.com/p-downgrades-france-credit-rating-aa-0...
Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
People around the world deserve not to live in fear of their government killing them. Women deserve not to live in fear of being raped. Children should not live in fear of abuse. Yet untold millions starve, are beaten, tortured, abused, have lives of unimaginable torment and despair, and you have the gall to talk about how the privileged few should not work so hard?
How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
Deserves in the same sense that they deserve the other natural rights and protections which are afforded them within our societies. I wouldn't be quite so prescriptive about the number of hours, but being able to work in a decent and humane manner, without damaging your health, and with space for an outside life, is significantly more important than many other natural rights.
> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
Work, for the vast majority of people, has no such aim, and no such outcome. If anything, people in the developed world are often in direct competition with their counterparts elsewhere.
I'm not saying they should feel entitled, but that isn't very rational.
>Deserves? Why does anyone deserve anything? Nature itself does not act that way.
Living as we would in nature would be a HORRIBLE way to live human life. The way things "naturally" would occur is irrelevant, we build societies and develop science to improve our lives to where we all want them to be.
Chances are, you ain't alleviating suffering around the world by putting in overtime at your shitty startup job. So feel free to pack up at 5PM.
I don't think this situation is all that unusual. Charitable giving that's a fixed fraction of income is common practice in many religions (which have a whole lot of members) and among the "effective altruism" community (which is small but I bet it's overrepresented among HN types), and is a natural enough thing to do that I bet lots of other people do it.
(Ideally I wouldn't need to say these things explicitly, but I will anyway: Of course working harder is not always a good idea; as I said above, it's very much possible to work harder and merely make yourself tired and therefore less effective. And of course working harder, whether it makes you more effective or less, is no guarantee of getting paid more; plenty of employers are quite unresponsive to their employees' commitment and productivity. If anything I've said above looks as if it's denying those things then I expressed myself badly and I apologize.)
If a charitable organization needed some software written, volunteering to write it would certainly be helpful, but this still requires you to be a domain expert in two things, rather than one.
Unless you mean "valuable" in the sense of "makes you feel more fuzzy," in which case you are killing people and I advise you to stop.
(Of course "lives saved" is an unsatisfactory metric; something like QALYs would be better. But the lives-saved figure is the one I happen to remember.)
Are you one of those people where if I say, "Hey where do you want go for lunch?", would respond with "Nowhere, I just want to DIE, why do I get to eat if everyone else DIES!"
And yet we've progressed from our prehistoric roots and have decided as a society that everyone does deserve basic rights.
> How about those of us born into a life of privilege work harder until suffering is alleviated, until pain is removed, until equality is reached.
Working harder at a mundane job won't achieve this. At best it means you'll just have less family time, leisure time, and be unhappier. At worst it means you're taking a bigger slice of the global economic pie, and contributing to inequality.
In the factory floor, this has been quantitatively measured and is solid. In creative jobs, quantification is a lot harder, so proof isn't as solid. I can argue for longer hours in creative jobs. I can as easily argue for shorter than 40h weeks. In the absence of further solid proof, the best option is probably to stick with 40h weeks.
So, leaving aside the rant about evils in the world and other straw men, Nature does act that way.
There's a good summary of arguments and references here: http://legacy.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-less...
We deserve at least 5:4. Personally I think 4:5 would be nice. I'd get a lot done.
The numbers didn’t come from nothing, but certainly didn’t come from any great calculation. It came from how much we (the workers) could wrestle away from industrialists. Google scholar searches (not very extensive, feel free to repeat) weakly suggests that cutting work hours may have a net positive effect on economy, so as long as I’m operating from the worker perspective, it actually makes sense to not settle on the current ratio. It’s like settling on your wage because you once got a raise 105 years ago.
New Economics Foundation report on a 21 hour work week
It seems crazy that a high responsibility job like that, where peoples lives depend on it, and it is expected to be done by sleep deprived junior doctors.
She is Mexican, but as far as I can tell it is not restricted to that country.
I think the main reason is there are two few doctors for too many patients. The reasons for that situation are a separate topic all together.
Now, working an 80-hour week once in a rare while? That actually works. If you have a really important deadline or really need to get something done, sure. But doing it regularly is completely irrational. Take a look at "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work"[1].
[1]: http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w...
It's also very important not to fall into a trap that demands extreme hours often. It's too easy to think it'll be "just this once". And if it really is just once--for some very good reason--then fine. But if you catch yourself doing it repeatedly, watch out.
If you want to accomplish anything, you should of course be willing to work hard. But, more importantly, you have to work efficiently. Constantly working long hours might be hard, but it's not efficient. Especially for a startup, how hard or long you worked simply does not matter--what's important is what you accomplished.
That being said, when you're working on something you enjoy and you get into that "flow" state, time becomes irrelevant. If something is fun and energizes you, you can do it without watching the clock, which the author does with his side projects.
If you work at a regular job and say you get into that flow state for 2 hour or so, when you're done, you realize, "shit, i have to be here for another 6 hours." Then you spend a lot of time dicking around on the internet/answering e-mails/doing non mentally taxing stuff. However, those 6 hours are actually pretty draining/depressing because you have to maintain the illusion that you're working + deal with the guilt that you're not being productive.
I dunno, maybe I'm just especially lazy and would like to spend as little time as possible working on things I don't enjoy.
the "flow" state you describe is quality time. we all pretty much like that.
on the flip side, if i'm at home 12 hours a day but my wife is in the other room and my child is watching tv while i'm on my phone checking twitter and hacker news... you get the point.
all these numbers and thresholds are practically irrelevant. quality of time spent is key...
I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I've always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require >8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn't really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I've produced PnL.
I'd like to add that the statement "If you’re salaried, you’re working for free" is inaccurate in two very important dimensions:
1) Equity stake. The 40 hour workweek was invented for laborers, not owners. Would the author admonish a business owner to only work 8 hours a week? At what level of ownership stake does it become acceptable to work more than 8 hours?
2) Compensation increase through recognition and achievement. Working extra hours may not increase one's immediate paycheck but after many years in this business I feel comfortable saying that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.
I agree. I don't think I'd be in the same place in my career today if I had a "working for free" attitude. Sometimes it was more hours and sometimes it was just a genuine curiosity about taking on challenges that are completely foreign to me.
Getting increases in comp is always a long-term game. There's no road map (i.e., work 2 more hours building this to get that experience which will increase my market value by X) and you'll go down a lot of wrong roads that will add zero to your market value. More importantly it requires delayed gratification. There can be a long delay between the work you put in and the payoff.
1) Business owners aren't laborers. They work, and they may draw a salary for tax purposes, but they cannot be placed in the same bin as "employee," which is what "laborer" means in this context. As a matter of opinion on your aside, I'd argue that the "level of ownership" required would be one sufficient to imbue the equity holder with the significant responsibility, authority, share of the profits that other "major" equity holders have.
2) That compensation generally rises with recognition and achievement is: a) not in dispute; b) not relevant to the point, because it doesn't address unpaid hours worked.
* There's a certain argument that exempt salaried employees are paid for their expertise, not their time. Therefore, the hours they work merely divide the salary they earn, so that their effective hourly rate decreases as hours worked rises, but is never zero. Of course this isn't applied symmetrically--a salaried worker who completes his tasks "early" in the week is unlikely to be allowed to take the rest of it off without a reduction in pay (or, more likely, suspicion and being marked for termination).
In regards to #2, I don't think you can wave away this point. A raise is, in fact, compensation.
With respect to #2: A raise is not, in fact, compensation. It's a promise of future compensation based on future work. Calling it anything else is, frankly, less than honest.
WRT #2, the impact on income when viewing a career over a long period of time is clear. It appears you're being dishonest by refusing to acknowledge this rather obvious fact. You can say "it's not compensation" until you're blue in the face but at the end of the day people who do more will on average earn more.
You're conflating "compensation in year N+1" with "being paid for hours worked in year N." The compensation you're talking about is dependent on work done in year N+1, and is not some sort of "back pay" or "built in, amortized pay" for the work done previously.
A simple example may help illuminate what "working for free" means in the context of this discussion.
1) You earn $1000 per week in salary compensation. 2) You work 45 hours during a given week. 3) You are paid $1000 for work done that week.
It doesn't matter whether you get a raise the next week, or what the amount of the raise is. For the week you already worked you contributed 5 hours of unpaid, free labor to your employer.
Consider the following "toy model", which is of course a deliberate oversimplification. Everyone starts at a salary of $10000/year, in exchange for which they are required to work 40 hours per week. If you choose, you can work 50 hours per week instead (all year), in which case your salary the next year will be 10% higher.
In this model, all the compensation-or-not-whatever-you-want-to-call-it you get for working extra hours is in the future, and does indeed depend on your working in the future. Just as you say.
On the other hand, someone who works 40 hours a week every week for 10 years gets $100k and someone who works 50 hours a week every week for 10 years gets almost $160k.
I don't think the fact that the compensation is in the future and subject to uncertainty makes it any less real. Imagine that it works this way instead: When you work extra hours one week, you get "paid" a token. If you collect enough tokens, you can exchange them for a salary increase. It seems clear to me that these tokens have value (would you rather have 100 of them than 50? Yes? Then they have value), and therefore being given them in exchange for doing extra work is a form of compensation.
Of course in the real world you don't know that your extra hard work will lead to a salary increase, and you don't know you'll still be working at that employer to take advantage of it. So let's say that those tokens are exchangeable, once you have enough, for stock options instead of salary increases. Again, clearly compensation (though you might choose to be skeptical about how valuable it is) and uncertain in very much the same ways.
It is, for sure, true in a sense that for the extra-hard week you just worked you contributed some "unpaid, free labor to your employer". But you probably did it with the understanding that it would, on balance, lead to your employer paying you more in the future (either in recognition of your productivity and commitment to the company, or on account of being more successful through your efforts, or both). The difference between this and real unpaid work is much the same as the difference between lending someone some money (when they might just run away with it and never repay you) and giving it to them.
Now, if you weaken your claim a little and say that extra work is generally very badly paid, I'd be much more likely to agree.
1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the 'achieved level'. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of 'excelled levels'.
2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up.
3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won't be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this.
4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough.
5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren't going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding/debugging effort - no way around it.
Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV.
EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great & growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.
Why?
Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere.
2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now.
3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams.
That's off the top of my head.
>Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.
I meant ownership in terms of features / products. The money becomes a non-issue after a point.
To answer your specific question: Yes. You do receive shares / sign-on bonuses and these amount to be very big. But they usually have a vesting period though.
Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down.
It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine.
Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty interesting, but the opportunity cost was too high.
The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.
You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :)
I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though.
My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation.
The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.
If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group.
It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.
And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours.
Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.
Also I don't manage people. Just projects - a Technical lead so to say.
In the tech industry, specifically with software development, I've had teams I've managed where we needed to pull longer hours in order to meet a deadline. And my teams stepped up, because we all wanted to succeed. The long hours were a known entity, and weren't the negative long hours.
I've also had teams forced into the negative long hours, and those were my fault (or rather, they were my responsibility to manage and I didn't do a good job.) Environments that somehow believe that those of us in the tech industry somehow enjoy acts like the "diving catch" and being "the savior" offer no value, other than learning what not to do.
The biggest thing to be cautious with long-hour situations is burnout. The negative long-hour scenarios can lead to resentment, but those feelings often pass after a while. Burnout, on the other hand, can have very real long-term consequences.
Adding "long hours don't actually mean you get more stuff done" into the mix is just a little ironic icing to the whole situation.
http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
(Poor management, poor planning, dropping productivity per hour worked as the workday is increased).
It's nothing new of course, Ford pushed for 8 hour shifts, not out of the kindness of his heart.
As for working "for free" -- that could be seen as poor labour laws. Norway has very strict rules regarding work hours (and compensation). Not that they're not broken -- but generally only managers (or others who realistically can set their own hours) are allowed effectively unlimited over time.
Funny and scary in equal measure.
Small company got acquired by a big 4 accounting firm. Lots of changes, seemingly lots of room for growth. Some people left. I stepped up (no promotion or raise) and took over for several departed people. Worked 12-14 hour days, 6 days a week, for 10 months. Received the highest performance award, which is given to 0.25% of the 50k+ employees in the US. Got a 1.25% raise because our unit was underperforming as a whole. Quit 4 months later. (after taking 2 months off after my second daughter was born.)
I wish this article at least had relevant studies + statistics on this subject as it is not representative of any of the 4 startup experiences I've been involved with. Actually, in diametric opposition to this author's stance, our teams' cultures were united and strenghtened around the concept of working hard (which, in our case, happened to at least partly equate to long hours).
I should be fair and admit, it may be the case that this article is more relevant to later stage companies -- I don't have a great amount of experience at 100+ employee companies.
From my experience, when one loves what one works on, one often works on said thing a lot. Some of the hardest working people I know work (addictively) towards projects they're not (necessarily) paid to work on. For instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not).
Im not so enlightened that I can draw conclusions about people who _don't_ work long hours, but it seems intuitive that people who do work long hours fall into one of two binary classes: (1) they are forced to (in order to achieve some level of compensation) / fear layoff, (2) they like the product, team, or like working hard. That is, intrinsically one either wants to work hard or they don't want to.
You want people in the latter category, and you achieve this by being fair with equity, providing people opportunities to have an impact or work on what they love, by providing a supporting environment, and by having good hiring practices.
There will always be great people who love your team / vision / culture / management (un)structure and who physically cannot commit to 70 hour work weeks (family, etc). You and your team have to decide whether it makes sense for this person to be part of the team and be prepared to make adjustments to make it work.
What I wish this article was about:
* How teams can (and should learn to) effectively prioritize teammates' health
* Why pressure to work hard can be destructive
* How to programmatically or systematically eliminate or amortize stressful tech/scaling/hr/bd problems to avoid disasters.
[edit: fixing typos]
It's worth noting that the original article is content marketing for that company and they do not explicitly state that "culture consulting" is their business in the article. So it's fair to say they are using this as a mechanism to get more customers, and offering a fair point of view is secondary.
The military does this with its soldiers too. It's a system finely honed through centuries, and enables campaigns that truly rational players would abandon in an instant.
And, in another twisted example, viewers of the TV show 'Lost' were manipulated into caring for the characters, so that by the ridiculous end foisted on them, the entire thing had become 'about the characters'.
The life-lesson from this: be cynical.
Interesting that communities like this one define work as 'your day job'. See for you, it's okay that your teammate works the standard 8 hours on his computers, then goes home and spends another 5 doing more computer 'work'. Perhaps your distinction is that between 9 and 5, he's working for other people, not himself. What about somebody doing a startup? In that case, there should be nothing wrong with coding for 12 hours a day, since it's a personal project really.
Personally if I'm already spending half the day writing code, I will stay away from computers in the evening. There's much more to life.
It was one of the most rewarding and happy periods of work I've had.
I know there are medical studies that suggest less than x hours of sleep a night is bad for your health. Or, working more than 45-ish hours in a week spikes cortisol levels.
I'd like see the results of these studies correlated with respondent's happiness and satisfaction.
You've got a good insight here:
> Why pressure to work hard can be destructive
I also wonder if the negative health effects are more strongly correlated to the stress of "having" to work those sorts of hours vice legitimately "wanting" to work them, sans stress.
(Note that FAA actually limits how many hours a week an airline pilot can fly. I think the number is close to 30).
Surgeons? Nope.
Keep asking myself why I put in all the extra hours. Journalism's about as competitive an industry as exists but I didn't have self-advancement in mind. It wasn't because it was almost expected even if unwritten. Nor was it because of procrastination.
The explanation that jumps to mind's two-fold.
First, circumstance and necessity. The industry's not so much shrinking as shrivelling. By the time I left in July, I had two full-time staff to produce a newspaper which more oft than not numbered more than 100 tabloid pages. To give those numbers some context, there were many fewer pages and many more editorial staff when the paper was founded in the 1800s. Jobs simply needed doing and I was a willing horse.
And second, pride. Not pride in long hours but pride in a job well done. I was a martyr to the readers' cause and I was going to put out the best paper in my power.
However, three years later and long burned out, it was part a wider culture which culminated in me leaving the company. I've drawn similar conclusions to the author when he says work long hours--but only on your own terms.
Now, I prefer long, uninterrupted workdays, but I do not like to work much more than 40 hours per week. The traditional 5 day per week model is not perfect, though. I prefer 4 longer days (10-12 hours), and 3 days off.
> why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?
Strawman. Everyone stays that extra few minutes. Sometimes even a few hours on occasion. That's not what 'long hours' here refer to.
Overtime is expected in the design and development industry. It's when companies factor in overtime into their estimates in order to quote lower than other agencies competing for the same work because they know that the employees will pick up the slack to get it done, that's when it's not alright.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my job and where I work, but if overtime is an expected thing every single project, that's taking advantage of your own employees and a sure-fire way to churn through workers like butter and eventually get yourself a reputation in the industry for being a bad place to work. People talk and reputation matters in the design and development industry more than people realise, it's everything.
I have a family and friends, you might be okay with working overtime, but what about your wife, is she okay with it? What if you have children at home wanting to see their father? You might be okay with it now, but you'll regret it when you're older and realise you missed out on your children growing up.
If you are 20 and single, and staying late in the office means pizza and a bit of XBox with your team later on, it is genuinely much nicer than going back to your empty little apartment and microwaving an instant meal.
If you have a family, then regardless of how much you like XBox, if you are a decent person you will run out the door at 5.
I'm young and irresponsible. When I glance round the office at 8pm, and see a guys I know have baby children working free over time like every other night, I want to shake them.
If you work for someone else and your attitude is "haha I love this job so much I'm willing to do it for free" then everyone else starts discounting everything on you "because hey that guy loves doing this stuff".
Don't bring your love for the job into the equation because that will only hurt you.
You know what I do absolutely love? Having a roof over my head at night. Not starving to death.
"If you don't absolutely love your job, quit" is a great sentiment if you live in a utopian fairyland where you can comfortably support yourself knitting sweaters or playing video games or whatever it is you might love to do. In the real world, it's insultingly naive. Loving your job is a luxury that is simply not available to the large majority of humans, not at any price. If you're one of the exceptions, more power to you, but it's not really relevant to the rest of us.
this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we'd rather to that.
"We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline."
This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.
Adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project because more people doesn't immediately mean more productivity. Adding hours can only accelerate a project if more hours means more productivity. There are multiple studies that show this is false after a short period (a week or two), and that you rapidly go in the opposite direction. The mythical man month's points are irrelevant to this.
You're starting off with the base idea that there is something you can add can make a late software project more on time. Reality seems to indicate that often, a late software project will simply be late, unless you cut scope or corners mercilessly. Unless, in essence, you remove something.
wrote Phil Greenspun[1], here's the rest of the quote:
"... Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated."[1]
[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... (halfway down the page on this)
My point is, knowing that turning dial A up doesn't help doesn't mean that turning dial B up does. It just means turning dial A up doesn't. Sometimes the reality is that turning neither dial up is the only option, and you have to plan around that fact.
In reality, there's decent evidence out there to support the statement that turning dial B up can be just as counterproductive as turning dial A up unless it's done very judiciously.
Deadlines are artificial constructs in software development, usually built up and justified using completely fictional inputs. It amazes me how many can input assumptions and guesses and then treat the output as some concrete statement of fact.
This isn't to use the too common "it'll be done when it's done, man" Dude-ism, but it is a complete cop-out to point to some initial, often agreed-to-under-duress calendar mark as the agreement to unlimited overtime. It never means that.
I remember being in an agile meeting once where everyone estimated out some features and gave them durations (span of weeks based essentially on gut feel). These were all studiously entered into the workboard, where the manager then said "okay so that is n hours assuming 6.5 hours of work a day [assuming administrative overhead, bug fixes, etc]. So now if we just put in 9 hours of work a day we'll be done by [some calendar date]". That is the nonsense that yields most "deadlines".
However, I agree that many companies are not great at this. While my company is not perfect, their handling of this issue is one of the many things they do extremely well.
If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument.
I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
Also, people act to maximize their utility, not necessarily compensation. The act of working hard and hitting deadlines is a form of compensation in itself.
Finally, lots of people work a lazy 8 hours (with lots of time spent on the phone, Facebook, personal email) and need the extra hours to accomplish 8 hours worth of real work.
No thanks, unless I can take your company stock and flip it the same day, I'll take cash.
We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including:
- no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline
- if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time.
- if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time.
It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased.
The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster.
I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
Here's a fix, and it comes from within: Give up the ideal of objectivity. Objectivity doesn't exist.
I see this fallacy all the time from hackers. We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures. Embrace it.
I am aware of phenomenology and I've read some Merleau-Ponty. To my taste, however, the situation where an objective/"objective" scientific truth makes consistent predictions about my sensory experiences that suggest a physical outside world and another where that truth makes consistent predictions about the outside world itself, which in turn causes the sensory experiences, don't seem different in a meaningful way. Why make that distinction?
My point is simply that just because the scientific method leads to useful predictions that doesn't make it objective truth nor does it invalidate the importance of subjective experience.
Okay, I think I understand your position now. (Though I'm not sure if the lack of belief in objective truth is as common as you claim.) Sorry be so persistent but I have to ask: suppose you do care about the nature of existence; how do you tell if it's one or the other or which one is more likely?
BTW, I have found Yudkowsky's "The Simple Truth" an effective argument against those claim that objective truth doesn't exist. If you walk in the way of a speeding train, you will die irrespective of your beliefs. Beliefs don't alter the reality. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
How would you convince a Solipsist that there is an objective truth?
I can't. But let me quote Bertrand Russell from "An Outline of Philosophy":
Solipsism (the theory that I alone exist) is a view which is hard to refute but still harder to believe. Solipsism is not really believed even by those who think they are convinced of its truth.
A solipsist would have no objection to jumping from a cliff, would he? But he won't actually do it.
Just because you believe reality doesn't exist outside your own mind doesn't mean you can't die.
All solipsism says is that you can't be sure reality exists outside of your own mind. You can question whether or not you would be dead outside of your own experience, but you'd still be dead in your internal world.
Except the solipsist is also unsure he exists outside of his own mind too, so why would he believe he is the sole exception to everything he's observed in the only reality he can be sure of?
I mean if you're unsure there is a reality outside of your own mind, wouldn't that make you more risk adverse? Your death could potentially mean that everyone you've ever known/loved would cease to exist, even if they are a product of your unconscious mind...
A solipsist isn't "unsure", he definitely believes reality doesn't exist outside of his own mind. That alone sets him apart from everyone and everything else in the universe, because a solipsist believes he is the only one who actually exists.
But we've strayed pretty far from my original point, which was that you can't disregard centuries of philosophical thought with a story that doesn't address any of the arguments of the ontological frameworks it's trying to refute. I'm not personally a solipsist, but solipsism is by definition not falsifiable, so I'm a little confused about where this conversation is supposed to go...
"I refute you!"
Joking aside, I feel Solipsism is immature. Do you know which demographic also comprises Solipsists? Two year olds. "Mommy doesn't exist when I close my eyes." This gives Solipsists an excuse to stop thinking critically about things like ethics, et al. So in this sense, Solipsism's just a cop-out which justifies laziness. When someone says "objective reality doesn't exist", what I really hear is "everybody's equal; you all get a trophy; we all have a right to our opinions". You might recognize this as the Red Herring Fallacy. I think Solipsism is a subtle version of this same fallacy.
Paul Graham says something similar about the subjectivity of aesthetics * : "Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. She's trying to get the two of you to stop bickering." I think this applies to Moral Relativism, Solipsism, and generally most philosophies which deny the existence of objectivity.
* http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Post Modernism is often said to have been a reaction to Modernism. But I think it's even more important to realize that Post Modernism is a reaction to World War I and II. After WWII, I imagine people realized "Science and objectivity gave us cars and electricity, but it also gave us mustard gas and nuclear weapons. Maybe this whole Modernism gig isn't so great after all..."
According to Literary Post Modernism, there's lots of conflicting narratives rather than a single objective perspective. During the chaos of World Wars I and II, I imagine war-stories naturally contradicted one another. I like the conflicting POV aspect because it can encourage the reader to question the author's reliability, like in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since "it's all equally valid". This negative aspect fits really well with the self-esteem movement, which (I'll say again) I think is a cop out for thinking critically.
You may notice I'm not refuting Solipsism per se, but ulterior motives for believing Solipsism is valid. This is because going down the road of "formal proofs" probably won't yield anything convincing. We'd simply talk past each other, and in circles, and bicker over definitions. But at the end of the day, it's pretty difficult to disprove abstractions and ideologies sin finding an inherent contradiction. And I'll even admit, maybe Solipsism actually is true. Who knows? I won't claim outright that Solipsism is false. But in my own experience, I find it very unlikely that Solipsism is true * . And I do want to acknowledge a possible bias for believing "Solipsism is true" due to it's convenience.
* http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
p.s. I do find the Harry Potter fan-fic kinda weird...
"Unfortunately, Post Modernism can also have the opposite effect: encouraging readers to quit thinking too hard and to accept the text as it is since 'it's all equally valid'"
Isn't deconstructionism sort of a core component of Postmodernism? Doesn't the deconstructionist view say that you shouldn't accept the text as it is?
>We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures
and a thought-terminating cliche like
>Objectivity doesn't exist.
The latter doesn't seem like a helpful response to someone who is apparently asking for scientific evidence for long working hours and/or overtime doing harm to you. If anything, knowing what science says on the matter is emotionally important as it could either (if the possibility of permanent harm is limited) provide some relief to or (otherwise) justify the indignation of a person currently doing overtime and unhappy about it (and hopefully lead to action on their part). Both scenarios seem desirable to me.
Edit: Could you explain the downvotes? In case it sounded dismissive I changed "thought-stopper" to the more formal "thought-terminating cliche" above and added the ellipses for clarity.
I was also apparently too sleepy to call parentheses by their name.
I started off working 80+ hours a week, as did many of the others, and loved it. We all did pretty nicely out of it thanks to share options.
But 10 years later, post acquisition(s), and most people who are still here have families and more life outside work. I work part time so I have a day with my daughter and I officially work 33 hours a week, in a "long" week I maybe work 35 hours and I rarely ever take my laptop home. It's all helped me to be a lot more focused in the relatively short time I am at work.
I guess a lot of it is about experience and, as the saying goes, "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
This is yet another thing that I see with regards to procrastination. It automatically seems to vanish every time I work on some interesting projects, or if good money is involved. If you are unconsciously procrastinating for no good reason, may its a good sign that you find that project no longer rewarding. And its time to move onto something else.
Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...
Sprints and pushes now and again are exceptions -- there is nothing inherently wrong with needing to put in a long week or two, even a month or two, irregularly in order to get a feature out that just needs to be built. But extended continual work definitely does sap the creativity and stress every relationship a person has outside of the office.
I've said it before, but these kinds of articles/blog posts always read as a justification on the part of the author for not working more.
I spent two years in banking - normally we had 18+ hour workdays... definitely gave me stamina later on.
Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year.
You pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work.
I've worked in a few startups, as well as had my own where I was working 6-7 days a week 15+hours on most week days, and it didn't result in a big pay day. I've had lots of stock in bankrupt companies and experience to show for it.
However, I will say that it is possible you'll gain lots of experience, and I wouldn't give up my long hours in my youth for anything else. It was great experience and I loved being in the thick of it.
As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate more of a balance.
He was at a bank, not at a startup. Since you are not familiar with bonus structures at banks, what he's talking about could roughly double a salary in a _cash_ bonus.
People in banking/finance have a very skewed sense of reality when it comes to work and fair compensation. You generally have to take their anecdotal advice with a grain of salt if that's all they've ever done.
No line of work can consistently deliver the kinds of returns that finance can. Hence its very easy to justify the longer hours in that industry since they turn into very real dollars. For the rest of us, putting a dollar value on our output is much harder to quantify.
Personally I can absolutely see "working" long hours -- but then that'd probably be something like 6 hours effective programming/planning/implementing and 6-8 hours of studying.
Either that or doing some form of manual labour with which I'm familiar/skilled enough that slips in concentration wouldn't be damning. But even for those kinds of jobs, having three (or four) shifts to 24 hours would probably be much more effective (again, if possible).
Could be an IPO, restructuring etc
That means lots of modeling and dicking around with slide decks
RE lunch: I took fewer than ten lunches away from my desk over those two years.
Generally dinner at the desk via Seamless
Your blog looks fantastic. Clean & simple without looking like it's trying too hard. Nicely done.
Factor in:
1. Love of what you do
2. Computer addiction (which is not in the DSM (yet))
3. Avoiding other forms of stress not work-related
[EDIT:] Hello, Japan!