23 ms·

Less stress, more productivity: working fewer hours is good for you and your boss

605 points by itamarst 10y ago

Apreche 10y ago
Recruiters. Find me a company that believes this, and I'll actually reply to you.
- existencebox 10y ago
  Find me a boss that believes this (and has their own boss believing them/it enough that they don't force them to maintain the status quo) and I'll go work for them and then recruit you. Less jokingly, there are two problems here; one that this sort of embedded culture is very slow to move (especially given that the powers that be are often from prior eras of culture) and secondly that I believe there are actively people of THIS generation who still believe in or at least pay sufficient tribute to the "butts in seats, work long hours" mindset. (I reference family members in finance, and managers I've had at software bigcos in the past spouting such wonderful quotes as 'I can't advocate him (a high performing engineer) for a promotion because he's full remote and it sets a bad precedent' and 'You need to increase your throughput. (me) You realize I'm already working 13 hour days. (him) Work harder.')
  - bcrescimanno 10y ago
    > Find me a boss that believes this (and has their own boss believing them/it enough that they don't force them to maintain the status quo) See my HN profile if you're looking for that combo. :)
    - ohstopitu 10y ago
      any chance you are looking for fresh grads (in Canada) ?
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Many companies are in a mild version of a Malthus/Schumpeter trap. They live on an essentially negotiated resource level that will go down year by year. They've managed to careen into a business model where the income stream is latched and ever so slightly declining. It's like they are an airplane on an engine-out landing. This happens A Lot. I won't say you don't want to work for them, but there's almost no chance of actually innovating or "selling" their way out of this trap. There are two ways out - acquisition and closing the doors.
- tarr11 10y ago
  Ask them on the interview. It will be a red flag to dysfunctional companies who think you don't want to work hard. Employees at good companies will be proud that they don't overwork.
  - actsasbuffoon 10y ago
    This is true in my case. We work 8 hour days, 5 days per week, and I always mention it when interviewing candidates. We're proud of the fact that we can ship a successful product without working the team to constant exhaustion.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - shostack 10y ago
    I actually ask on the first call now. Saves a tremendous amount of time.
- shostack 10y ago
  My company fully believes in this (although many people choose to work more because they are Type A and love their work--their decision). The hard part is convincing candidates we're not BSing them about this, or our benefits. Especially ones from sweat shops that have clearly been scarred by the experience and suspect everyone is lying to them to trap them.
  - thedufer 10y ago
    > My company fully believes in this (although many people choose to work more because they are Type A and love their work--their decision). Peer pressure, whether actual or imagined, will keep people from leaving when they should if others are working longer. I have in the past told people to go home even if they wanted to keep working - this is the only way to actually respect the work/life balance of their peers.
dumbfounder 10y ago
Sounds nice, but maybe some evidence would be good?
- baptou12 10y ago
  "Why does working longer hours not improve the situation? Because working longer makes you less productive at the same time that it encourages bad practices by your boss. Working fewer hours does the opposite."
  - dumbfounder 10y ago
    This is evidence? Working fewer hours than what? There is obviously a point where your productivity drops off, but that doesn't mean you are producing less work overall. What I would like to see is tangible evidence. Perhaps analyzing Jira for several companies to see the effort put into projects vs the overall productivity. Maybe set the baseline at the 40 hour week and analyze a few different chunks like 30, 35, 45, 50, and 60 hours per week. Without some sort of analysis like this all we have pure conjecture, and no way to understand where a reasonable cutoff should be.
    - itamarst 10y ago
      There's been research in other fields, at least, not that much in software sadly. See end of http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons for references.
    - Atropos 10y ago
      I agree. Things like having the weekends free and getting enough sleep are really important for having a sustainable working life. But that does not mean working 35 hours per week is a must or 40 hours is a natural limit, for example 9 AM to 8 PM from Monday-Friday is a 50 hour workweek and easily sustainable. The norm in industries like banking, big law firms or management consulting is more like a 60-70 hour work week and while it is obviously not desirable, there are many people who can do it for many years.
- 10y ago
pc86 10y ago
> Long hours: "It's 5 o'clock and I should be done with work, but I just need to finish this problem, just one more try," you tell yourself. But being tired it actually takes you another three hours to solve. The next day you go to work tired and unfocused. > Shorter hours: "It's 5 o'clock and I wish I had this fixed, but I guess I'll try tomorrow morning." The next morning, refreshed, you solve the problem in 10 minutes. I have too much experience with this. I remember when I was self-employed I humble-brag tweeted about my production deployment ~15 minutes after starting work. A friend of mine asked why I hadn't just deployed last night and the quote above was my first thought (in addition to the fact that you should never deploy to prod then go to bed). I was done with work, so I stopped. It avoids hitting that "grind it out" phase where you're lucky just not to do more harm than good.
- overcast 10y ago
  This has happened way more times than I can count. Spending hours staring at a line of code, up all night. Wake up next morning, and it's a simple spelling mistake I've missed. Grinding out work has never been productive. Mistakes happen when you're tired. This applies to study cramming as well, and it's completely pointless. Study as much as you can, until your NORMAL bed time, then stop and get a full nights rest before the test. Side note, it's no wonder these big games come riddled with bugs these days. Pushing developers to the extreme during crunch time, just to meet a deadline. There is NO WAY they are doing everything correctly.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    I think it does sometimes work, which is why at last I fall back to it. Grind out fix.. 90% success rate, average time to solve - 1 hour. Sleep and fix in the morning.. 100% success rate, average time to solve - 15 minutes. Clearly better to sleep but if something needs fixed NOW... then it's time to grind I guess...
    - overcast 10y ago
      Well to be fair, we're not talking about emergencies, obviously those get priority. And of course, as much as people would like you to believe, most things are not an emergency!
rabino 10y ago
I was expecting the list of sources at the bottom of the article to be a mile long. Not a single one. Hot damn, so much broscience and red herrings.
- ShakataGaNai 10y ago
  To be fair, the title wasn't "New study proves that..." or even "Scientists say...". It was very clear that this a blog post written by a dude sharing his own experiences and anecdotes. Not some "proof" that life is better with less hours.
- itamarst 10y ago
  http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons has a bunch of research in non-software fields cited at the end.
jhummel 10y ago
I started a consulting/services company a few years ago, and this year was finally in a position to start hiring. I'm a big proponent of this type of thinking, so while I couldn't offer the best salary, or the best benefits - I could offer a better work/life balance. I knew it was a win-win for us and the new employee. We landed on a 36 hour work week. 8-5 Mon-Thurs, then 8-12 on Friday. We had more applicants than I ever dreamed of, and scored a great hire that was coming from the 70-hr-a-week startup life. Everyone's been extremely happy over the past six months, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any productivity what-so-ever.
- tdees40 10y ago
  I've always wondered why more companies don't do this. Offer a 30 or 35 hour work week and watch the top-notch candidates roll in, even though you can't offer a top-notch salary.
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    We went more extreme and went to 20 hours a week, though we're a little crazy when it comes to our philosophy about work. It did exactly as you described, though. We're able to attract top talent engineers even though we're a tiny consulting company that nobody has ever heard of.
  - ashark 10y ago
    There's a ton of pressure to work more hours, from all over the place. It's way more visible than other metrics. Project fails, the team Fred was leading was averaging 30 hours a week and everyone knows it? Fred's gone, doesn't matter how productive they were, and everyone on that team had better watch out. You tell the client features X and Y aren't gonna make the next deadline before [industry trade show], then client finds out all your people are putting in sub-40-hour weeks? Client's gone and telling anyone who'll listen that your shop is full of entitled, lazy scam artists who will take your money and fail to deliver what you asked for. Flip that, same thing but the teams were averaging 60-hour weeks. It does not matter if that's worse for the product or if it's the cause of the failure, or it two of your best people quit over it—it means "not working enough" is off the table when the blame game comes around, and a smaller chance of getting a pink slip or passed over for a promotion or raise. Any place where this sort of thing isn't a concern is like the eye of a storm—everything around is horrible chaos & destruction and the calm is fragile, precious, and could end at any moment.
us7892 10y ago
Bottom of the article has a link...to learn from your mistakes (perhaps because you worked too many long hours.) We can get emailed a list of his mistakes. https://softwareclown.com/ https://softwareclown.com/
namenotrequired 10y ago
I thought this was about working fewer hours than full time, but apparently it's about working no more than full time.
- itamarst 10y ago
  OP here: I've actually worked 27 hour work/week, but that's a hard sell given we're in an industry that's trending towards insane hours as the norm. So partially this is just me trying to explain than normal hours are actually better (which is I admit a sad thing to have to explain). But less than full time is even better, yes. For me at least I think 30 hours/week would be the ideal.
shams93 10y ago
Its the Theater of Productivity, similar to the TSA. You can see Meyer's approach to productivity was ultimately just as successful as the TSA on secutity. Yeah doing an early stage startup it could be on the side of a day job so yes you are going to inevtiably put in a lot of hours for $0 doing a startup. But for regular businesses that are well established such as Yahoo this isn't productivity its Productivity Theater in the same way the TSA are Security Theater.
known 10y ago
Not for Non-IT
tonyjstark 10y ago
Of course every personal experience is just anecdotal but since I only work 24 hours a week I feel able to educate myself, do sports, feel more healthy. Before that I worked one week full and one week only 4 days repeatedly and I really got the feeling that coming in on Mondays after a short week was so much easier. I felt more relaxed and satisfied because I could do other stuff on the weekend than trying to catch up with buying things and all that organizational junk you have to do as an adult. Now I work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week and I don't take long breaks anymore. I stopped to read blogs or news at work after lunch, I just work. Would be really interesting if this is just me or if it could be scientifically proven that working less is more.
- rdm42116 10y ago
  May I ask what industry you work in?
  - tonyjstark 10y ago
    I support researchers of the humanities by developing different services like registries and restful apis. But you know, everything has it's cost. I am definitely underpaid but at some point I decided time > money for now.
- wineisfine 10y ago
  That's right, no man can excel more then 6 hours a day doing great, focused work.
- mattm 10y ago
  We can't all be Iron Man unfortunately ;)
Noseshine 10y ago
http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-10-26 http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-10-26 Does anybody have time to comment on the article submitted by OP? :)
dsugarman 10y ago
Henry Ford originally found that 40 hour work weeks were optimal for productivity for his factory employees. Before this, they only had one day of rest and were generally overworked and inefficient. I think the work of a factory worker is vastly different than the work we do today behind a computer, especially programmers where your brain power is everything. It would be interesting if a big enough company were to do some proper research on the most efficient working patterns of a programmer today.
sakian 10y ago
How does a company like SpaceX fit into this? They seem to promote the opposite and are seeing some pretty amazing success. Do they succeed because of or despite working long hours?
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  Maybe I've seen it in the past but I don't remember it now -- what is their employee turnover rate? I imagine they have no shortage of applicants willing to put in 70 hour weeks until they burn out, just to get that name on their CV.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/309990/why_does_spacex_require_such_long_hours_instead/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/309990/why_does_spa...
    - fluxquanta 10y ago
      Fun fact -- I originally wrote "80 hour weeks" in my post and thought, "Nah, that's too much," and bumped it down to 70. Looks like I was way off, haha.
    - projektir 10y ago
      This sort of thing makes it hard for me to respect Elon Musk. He is, personally, doing great things, but I wonder if his overall effect on the world is negative in the long term because he's promoting some views that I find very harmful. So many people around him, who admire him, yet he feels like a one man team.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  This isn't an absolute. Of course you can do "sprints" successfully. You just can't do it for very long. And we don't know and never will if one or the other problem they had might not have been prevented if the guy designing or making the part had had enough sleep - so it's always a discussion with insufficient data. After all, we've had enough research to show that a lack of sleep impacts the brain, from psychological studies to neuroscience, which now tells us that the brain is actually cleared of toxins during sleep. For the cases who still get enough sleep, well, not sure how the lack of "a live (outside work)" impacts various factors short and long term. For my coding work I have stopped doing certain kinds of coding after evening, basically, anything that isn't "mechanic" but requires design decisions. Even if it's "urgent". Executing what I had decided earlier is okay, but decision making just doesn't work as well for me that late in the day, even if I still feel great. The next morning always seems to bring a fresh perspective.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stevenwiles 10y ago
> when I was self-employed I humble-brag tweeted about my production deployment ~15 minutes after starting work What a truly bizarre thing to do. You sound like an awful person. Can I ask why you are so self-obsessed?
- pc86 10y ago
  The kind who doesn't feel the need to make wild assumptions about someone's character based on a single statement while ignoring the larger point.
  - stevenwiles 10y ago
    Why did you start your comment with "The kind who..." What question is that supposed to be answering? If I had said something like "What kind of person...." but I said nothing like that. So here, we have more proof of your self-obsession - you don't actually listen to other people, you just hear what you want to hear.
    - random_rr 10y ago
      Stop. This isn't civil or productive.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320482 and marked it off-topic.
mlvljr 10y ago
..and boss's wallet, yeah!
codingdave 10y ago
Even better, drop hours as a metric of work. Offer the flexibility to work whatever hours are most productive... and find a boss who doesn't care whether that is 40 or 20, as long as he gets the value he expects from your time. After all, employment is a business contract. You are given money in exchange for the value you add to the organization. Not hours... value.
- softawre 10y ago
  You should start a consulting business or startup and offer this.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  Measuring that value precisely may ultimately consume more value than a crude metric like hours.
- imh 10y ago
  I have heard managers respond that if you can get your responsibilities done in half the time, you should be getting more responsibilities.
  - jocro 10y ago
    I'd respond that I'd expect to be getting a requisite increase increase in compensation. At least I hope I would.
    - Salgat 10y ago
      The problem is they directly translate hours in seat to pay, so your logic would make no sense to them.
    - dnh44 10y ago
      Years ago I casually met an owner of a small software company who happened to be hiring, and I was looking for a job. He asked if I was cheap and I instantly answered 'why, are you?' Normally I don't think of witty things like that to say until about a week after the event.
anupshinde 10y ago
I think the key is less-stress and not shorter hours. Meetings, especially long ones, induce stress. I've tried reducing hours (as a freelance remote developer). I cut my working hours to 25 per week from somewhere around 60ish per week. (And I could afford losing out money) At first, I felt I was missing something. I thought it was the money. After being completely off work for a month, I realized I was missing the people (Slack chats, meetings, fire-fights) When I started back with another client, working just 25 hours per week was much much much harder. None of these worked: 8x3days, 4x6days, 6x4days, 5x5days. Few weeks I could not even complete 15 hours, and other weeks I was over-working. I was still stressed. Finally, what worked was odd - (10-12 hours)x2.5 days. So I ended up working a bit more hours than I wanted to. It was proven again that it takes time and focus to pickup momentum and costs a lot more to loose it frequently. And I still work on my other stuff totalling to about 45-50 hour work-weeks and still feels much less stressful.
- dnh44 10y ago
  Have you tried working when you feel like it (or when you really have to), and just not working when you're not in the mood? I had a three year period working freelance and it was most profitable and fun. I have no clue how many hours I was doing but for the last six months I only worked a few hours a week because I was able to automate most of my work. I'm doing a startup now and this lifestyle wouldn't be acceptable to my partners so it's back to a 9-late schedule plus weekends. I'm nowhere near as productive and strongly feel like I'm accomplishing less, but to go back to working how I like would just cause conflicts.
  - anupshinde 10y ago
    Unfortunately, I do not have such luxury. I do have flexibility within a work-week. i.e. I could be working on client project on MTW or FSS or in between, but I prefer doing much work within Tue-Fri. Fortunately, I have been with one very good client working on challenging stuff yet does not have tight deadlines. It is a risky strategy to stay with just one client - but I am not worried too much about it now. Since its billable hours, I don't see automation would help reduce my hours - it increases efficiency though. I tried a startup with some partners and recommended a flexible schedule, but unfortunately partners got too flexible and it never took off. It is better to slog and make others do that in a startup.
mastratton3 10y ago
I agree with the fact about cutting out meetings but I don't know if I agree with everything here. While its easy to say "Just leave at 5pm and come back refreshed" is easy to say, I found personally to have learned to most on the days when I've worked until 2am really digging into a problem and getting it fixed. I also have found that the best people I've worked with have a similar get it done attitude. Obviously this isn't sustainable but I think required from time to time. I also think this lacks the notion of "how much do you want to move up vs stay in your current role". If you don't have any desire for more responsibilities than this applies, but I think if you want to move up/learn new skills, reducing the hours works against you. I guess I follow the mantra of, "The first 40 should be productive and for the employer in the role I was hired for but I should spend additional time on top of that learning new skills"
- rdm42116 10y ago
  And I have found that tired employees make huge mistakes on customer critical systems. I have also found that some people are extremely successful working insane hours. They have the capacity to, either it's their personality or they're still young and single. To think that applies to everyone is the issue. Not everyone can work tired and produce good work or do a good job. Would you want someone tired working dangerous machinery just to get something done? We would all be against that. Yes, it's pretty well established that to move up hours must be put in. The reason this topic comes up time and time again is because no one asks the question why nor do they prove that these hours translate to better work or more productivity. I've seen insane hours in third party consultants. They mess up. A lot.
- jtrtoo 10y ago
  There's nothing wrong with working later / longer from time to time, particularly when you're hyper-focused on a problem. But making a habit of it -- or doing it out of obligation -- could be a sign that something is off (e.g. with one's time management or organizational skills, with one's life balance / priorities, or one's employer).
ErikAugust 10y ago
Tired is the worst time to code. There are other things you can do to be productive - but try not writing mission critical code when you are exhausted.
imh 10y ago
>There are companies where this won't fly, of course, where management is so bad or norms are so out of whack that even a 40-hour work week by a productive team member won't be acceptable. In those cases you need to look for a new job, and as part of the interview figure out the work culture and project management practices of prospective employers. Do people work short hours or long hours? Is everything always on fire or do projects get delivered on time? I have never figured out how to ask this. It always feels like I'm asking, "I don't like to work much, is that ok with you?"
- toolz 10y ago
  Well, that's the thing, you aren't really asking. You form the demand as a question to allow for negotiation, so it's not really a question. You should always try to walk into a negotiation from a position of power. It's an art form that is hugely valuable for getting what you want though, and you shouldn't feel bad about trying to get what you want. If you make your life better through negotiation then you might give someone else the confidence to put themselves in a better position. I'm not saying you should pretend your actions are altruistic, but don't blind yourself to the positives that can come from you trying to get what you want.
  - mamarjan 10y ago
    Sounds a bit complicated, but it's true. It's all about negotiation. I negotiated lower hours a month ago. After almost 3 years on a project, asked to go down to 20hrs/week. As I see it, I have proved I'm trustworthy and that I can contribute significant value to the project even with lower hours. In addition, my position of power was that I had some cash and other options, in case the other party refuses. This is actually something that keeps happening to me. I show my value and that I'm trustworthy, and get anything I want, be it working from home, lower hours, or both.
- martincmartin 10y ago
  Its tricky. I usually wait until near the end of the interview, after I've asked a bunch of questions, especially when they say "do you have any other questions?" Then I say, "Hmm. What is work/life balance like at X?" I used to wait until the end of the full-day interview, but many times found out I'd wasted a day on a company that I wouldn't want to work for. So now I do it at the end of the phone screen.
yodsanklai 10y ago
The most (professionally) successful persons I know worked very hard at least at some point in their life. For instance, I know tons of professors that pretty much work all the time. Same thing with former schoolmates working in finance now. I'm not saying it's the road to follow, and obviously, not all careers are comparable, but I think that in order to reach their full potential, people have to (and can) work a lot.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Just a few days ago I read an article or blog entry - which I may even have found through a comment on HN? - where a successful important person described the reunions with the people he had studied with over 20 years. At first everybody was so amazingly successful, great wife, then great kids, all doing very well, financially too. But after 10 years with each reunion less and less people showed up. Those who were missing had no wife and family left and didn't want their old pals to know how their personal lives had faltered. You only mention careers...? Please report overall long-term life success that includes the family :) Also, since you mention finance, while they personally benefited, and their industry did too, what about the rest of society? Does the latest microsecond computer trading algorithm really benefit mankind overall? So to summarize, the questions I have are about 1) individual success not just "career", "financial" and "short term", and 2) that individual success from the perspective of society.
  - yodsanklai 10y ago
    As I said, I didn't want to mean that everybody should work hard or that professional success is the only important thing. But I think that in order to succeed in a competitive field, one has too work hard and it's definitely doable. That being said, I'm an advocate of less working hours and more vacation. I worked in the US for a couple of years, and this is the one thing that made me go back to Europe. Free time is the most important thing in my opinion.
    - rdm42116 10y ago
      But how do you define "success?"
gthtjtkt 10y ago
> One programmer I know made clear when she started a job at a startup that she worked 40-45 hours a week and that's it. Everyone else worked much longer hours, but that was her personal limit. Personally I have negotiated a 35-hour work week. Wow, what a depressing time to be employed. The old standard (35 hours) is now considered a "short" workweek, and only the most desirable employees have the leverage to request it. Not to mention stagnant wages, rapidly rising costs of living, and off-hour availability expectations. How did we end up here?
- clw8 10y ago
  Pointy Haired Bosses
- softawre 10y ago
  Where are you working? My team works 40 hours max (never overtime over the 3 years I've been the lead). We make great money for the Midwest.
  - gthtjtkt 10y ago
    Small dev team at a non-tech company on the east coast, so all these nifty Silicon Valley management practices are unheard of here. At our company, you're lucky if you don't have to clock out and in for your lunch break... And I'm not one of those "most desirable" employees I mentioned earlier, so I'd be very lucky if I could negotiate for better hours or more vacation.
  - flinty 10y ago
    What city? Thinking about moving from the northeast. Trying to figure out some options.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Labor and capital are in constant conflict. Labor basically died as a cohesive international movement by the 80's. Labor-hating ideology has dominated economic thought for decades.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
bcrescimanno 10y ago
Just this week, I've been collecting feedback from my team. Some of the most powerful I received was, "Since you took over, I feel like I've gotten more done with so much less stress and extra hours. Until you came in, I didn't believe that we could really have work-life-balance and be MORE productive and now I know we can." Having been in companies where my approach has been called everything from "lazy" to outright "damaging," this feedback was both rewarding and validating. Edit: For those who are in jobs where you're putting in those long hours, I can tell you there are managers out there who believe in the message here. I have three of them working for me right now and I constantly reinforce the philosophy of working sustainably. Don't settle for less than a manager who respects you the person--not just you the engineer!
- ncallaway 10y ago
  Totally agree. We're running a team with engineers working 20 hours a week. That seems like about the amount of "productive engineering time" that most people have in them in a week, regardless of how many hours they actually spend working. It's a bit of an experiment, but I have to say that I'm really happy with what it's doing for us. Our engineers are still quite productive. Their work life balance is good, so we can avoid burnout (though this will take a long time to actually prove). And, finally, it gives us a _huge_ competitive advantage when it comes to hiring top quality engineers.
  - yojex 10y ago
    Would you mind letting us know where this is?
    - ncallaway 10y ago
      Sure. We're a small consulting company called Apsis Labs (http://apsis.io/ http://apsis.io/). We started in Seattle, although our hiring has been entirely remote across the US and Canada.
      - talmand 10y ago
jsprogrammer 10y ago
Good article, but I don't see where it addresses how working fewer hours is good for your boss (though, you can try to read in to it). The article even says that it (working less hours) won't work at some companies.
dasil003 10y ago
Having spent a lot of time both as a manager and as an individual contributor, here's the rub (at least for programmers): software developers are a classic market for lemons. The bigger the org and the more operational complexity the more space there is for poor developers to hide out and draw a pay check. But even at a small scale it's remarkably difficult to measure productivity actually. Therefore, what you need is intrinsic motivation. You need engineers who really care about solving the right problem at the right time in the right way. 35 hours or 70 doesn't matter if they can't get that right, and it's very hard to have management that is qualified to make that judgement on people (especially as an org grows and management becomes a full time job). So the problem is that given this opacity, finding someone who works 70 hours a week is a better proxy than someone who seems excited about a 35-hour work week—the former are people who are clearly driven whereas the latter are literally everyone. It's far from a good metric, but perhaps the best one available to the pointy hairs of the world. Speaking from personal experience, it wasn't until I had a kid that I found out what I could do in a 40-hour week. Once I had that time constraint, it forced me to be more efficient in a very deep and fundamental way from the core of my being. When I was 25 I would hit 5pm and think to myself: I still have another 8 hours to solve this problem before bed. Perhaps this is post-hoc justification, but I think that makes sense when you are just starting out and not really competent yet. Once you've passed the magic 10k hours or whatever, I think turning over problems in ones subconscious can provide a lot more of the value. So sleep / exercise / meditation can all help elevate your performance far more than extra hours—but only if your brain knows what it's doing.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  In my experience the lemons have no problem working 70 hour weeks; they weren't working that hard to begin with and know that they need to appear productive since they can't be productive. Whereas employees who are productive are tired after 35 hours or want to get home and work on side projects. Long work hours actually select for lemons.
- itamarst 10y ago
  Well, but here's the thing: you've figured out that you're more productive on shorter hours. So really you want to prevent those people who work long hours from doing so, because they'll actually do better. Not much research in sofware AFAIK, but there's a bunch of research in other fields showing maximal output is at 40 hours a week, with rapid fall-off at longer working hours. See http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons So it's your job as a manager to prevent burn out and maximize output by encouraging people not to work too long.
Abdizriel 10y ago
I agree with that. Last ~1-2hours in job I feel bored and everything is not so productive than it should. I would like to work in/create place where engineers work for ~30h a week including lunch/coffee time. I think with that kind of work everyone would be happy and could easly balance work/life
SonicSoul 10y ago
There is no science here what so-ever. Just a bunch of feel good rah rah BS about working less hours and getting more done. Some fodder to go to your manager with I guess. Who said that 35-40 hours is optimal? How can you even quantify it considering every job is different. I've had jobs where 50% was brainless support so i'd work 10-12 hr days and my brain was totally fine to keep going. Some jobs come with inevitable social BS that will take 50% of your time anyway. The problem is that management and developers have different incentives. Managers [in more cases then not] are pushed by executives to justify their worth and deliver results. Developers want to create, but also don't care as much about the bottom line. They want to have a life outside of work. It's that simple. Let's not go pretending like anything beyond 40 hours takes 10x time to get done because it simply doesn't. It's just an empty thing to say like "you should give me a raise because of inflation". There are plenty of people working their own startups doing 80-100 hr weeks and getting shit ton done. Does it mean that you should do this at a corporation? Maybe not, maybe yes. It all depends on the trade offs either side is willing to make. Managers will of course be incentivized to push for more productivity per employee. Places such as Basecamp take a stance against this incentive gap. They're actively working at making employees take more vacation, sleep better, and have a better work life balance. This must improve employee morale and retention. No idea what it does to bottom line or employee paychecks. As a manger I've had people that worked 40- hrs and delivered amazing results. I'd never even think about caring how many hours they've put in. Then there were others that worked more but delivered a mound of technical debt or nothing at all. They were usually the ones most vocal about working too many hours. There are very few people out there that can come in, get straight to work, and deliver quality. Simply making a blank statement that they will do more by working less is silly.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  I agree strongly with the idea that "40 hours" is just as made up as "15 hours" or whatever. We need actual data to draw any conclusions here. Similarly we haven't explored all the ways we can make people more productive either. Maybe if the employees who feel tired after six hours could take a long nap mid-day they'd be able to work 12 hours a day at a high level. That said I'm on the work what you feel comfortable working and as long as goals are being met then it doesn't matter.
afarrell 10y ago
This also applies if you are in university. Your ability to learn is directly related to the quality of sleep you have gotten. If your school believes "sleep is for the weak" and makes labs due at 6am, please realise that this is bullshit and find tools/habits to enforce a different discipline.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I remember when I realized in my introductory circuits class that all the problems were just puzzles, and sleep beats the hell out of studying when it comes to preparing for puzzles.
mindfulgeek 10y ago
The best "full time" work environment I experienced was a 9-5 week with morning/afternoon 3-hour coding blocks (no interruptions tolerated) and an hour lunch. The other hour was spent in the standup, email, one-off conversations and blogging/community work. We were a highly production and creative team.
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
Yeah.... not so much for me. I'm going to give an alternate point of view. To become world class at something, you need to be obsessed. You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing. "Oh but you won't be as effective after 8 hours of work!" So what. Let's say I'm only 20% as effective after 8 hours. I'll take it -- 20% of the last 5-6 hours of the day towards my craft over 0% doing 'normal' things (drinks on the patio? Pointless travelling? Whatever my fellow annoying millenials like to do). This is the kind of mindset you need to reach the top of a field. And it should develop naturally, you should really want it. Whether it means outdoing everyone at your company, getting that prototype done two months earlier, closing more leads, getting that tricky piano passage, whatever. If you love what you're doing, more is more. Because you probably can't help yourself. If you feel like working more, just do it. Don't let normal social expectations hold you back, especially if you're young, because you only get so long to become great at something. I'll finish with one final caveat. Figure out what level of sleep, exercise, and nutrition your body needs to sustain your desired work habits. Get those right ASAP, keep trying modifications, and realize it's different for everyone's unique biology. I like 8 hours of sleep a night, weightlifting 3x/week at 45-60mins each, and a certain amount of protein and certain vitamins (and coffee of course, ha). You'd be surprised how these 3 lifestyle factors can make such a huge difference in your energy levels and hormones -- one can literally become a different person!
- clifanatic 10y ago
  > You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing. I guess that depends on what you consider "work". I do programming stuff in exchange for money, and it's not always the programming stuff I want to do. When I'm not working I do programming stuff (or read about programming stuff) I do want to do, but not in exchange for money.
- projektir 10y ago
  This tends to be a non-issue, though. If you really love what you're doing that much, then it makes sense, and you are running off of additional energy. This doesn't apply for, I would say, 99% of people, though, and definitely should not be influencing policies or standard hiring.
fizixer 10y ago
In my experience, in order to maximize the productivity in creative work and still work 40 hours, you have to pick the best 40 hours out of a 168 hour time frame: - If it means you work '13 hours 20 minutes' on Monday Wednesday Friday, so be it. - If it means you work '5 hours 45 minutes' Monday thru Sunday, so be it. - If it means you work one way one week, the other way the next week, so be it. - If you work best in the middle of the night, so be it. - If it means you work 10 hours everyday for 52 days straight, and take the rest of the quarter off (39 days!), so be it. The problem is, we have to do this thing called 'work/life balance' in which we are at work 9 to 5, whether we feel fresh or tired, and have to forget about work for the remaining 128 hours. Combine that with the need for in-person interaction with the team, the boss, and what not, it gets worse. IMO you can't have it both ways.
aledalgrande 10y ago
I find that, for boring tasks or everyday work, this is true. I cannot use "turbo mode" for too long. But if there is something really challenging in which I plunged in, and at the same time I am getting results, it will break the rule. I think much of what written here makes sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_for_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_f... Also, if you really want to be productive, it's not about sleep, but about having very defined and organized tasks, so you limit the number of open decisions you have to take in a day.
atom-morgan 10y ago
Imagine trying to convince a slave master that freedom, in the long run, will lead to more productivity on a scale that they can't even imagine. I believe working fewer hours is a modern day version of that.
nathan_f77 10y ago
Right now I'm working 20 hours per week as a contractor. It's beautiful. My hours are also pretty flexible. If I'm really in the zone, I can work a 10 hour day. That's what I did today. I started at 3pm, had a break around 7pm, and I just finished what I was working on at 2am (30 minutes ago). Yesterday, I wasn't feeling motivated at all, so I just ended up taking the day off and doing something else. I'm living in Thailand, so normally I'll work from 10pm until 2am, so I have overlap with clients in the US. I wake up at 10am, and it feels like I have the whole day to do whatever I like. I'm earning less money, but I'm somehow saving much more than I did in San Francisco.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  The implication of those hours is that you go to bed pretty soon after finishing work -- how easy do you find it to wind down on a schedule?
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    Yes, that's right. I take about 30 minutes to read or watch something, but I usually find it very easy to fall asleep.
jupiter90000 10y ago
There are certain jobs where it may not work, but from what I've seen places I've worked, 40hr workweeks seem like a holdover from some, in my opinion, truly bizarre cultural expectations. I mean, at some offices I've worked people are basically shooting the breeze for at least 10 hours at the office a week with coworkers. Some of them don't like being at home with their families and so seem to think work is a way to get away from their responsibilities outside of work. I'd rather have that 'time bullshitting with coworkers' to do things I like to do not at work. Is this some holdover from previous generations of just wanting to pressure everyone to do what they had to do? Sure, sometimes things need to get done, but alot of jobs aren't saving lives or doing much amazing, but "hit that deadline or we're going to die" is almost the implication made in business in the US in my experience... Hopefully we'll stop this work addiction some day and realize lots of things can get done without making people be behind a desk an arbitrary number of hours per day...
- mattm 10y ago
  > Some of them don't like being at home with their families I've noticed this as well. The people who worked the longest hours did so because they didn't like going home.
ShakataGaNai 10y ago
This is one of the reasons why more telecommuting/remote work is "better". Since you've got no boss looking (literally) over your shoulder, you can't be judged on hours. Then things like output or project completion actually bubble to the top as most important.
tzakrajs 10y ago
The key to this article at a macroscopic level is the willingness to quit when the manager or culture are unwilling to adapt to your fewer hours proposition. We can positively change the industry for everyone by uniformly following this guidanace.
franciscop 10y ago
I thought this was about reducing it from 40h to 30h or so, but it was about fighting for the 40h themselves. I am in Japan now and things are really crazy here for my friends.
zooko4 10y ago
Hey, I know the guy who wrote this! As a boss, and in fact as the former boss of itamarst, I agree with this strategy. I want employees to produce high-quality work, to be predictable in their pace, to not get burnt out, and to be happy and pleasant to work with.
zooko4 10y ago
Hey, I know the guy who wrote this! As a boss, and in fact as the former boss of itamarst, I agree with this strategy. I want employees to produce high-quality work, to be predictable in their pace, to not get burnt out, and to be happy and pleasant to work with.
Waterluvian 10y ago
I've been fortunate enough that my employer encourages people to find the patterns that work for them. Now that I've been there a few years, I've been taking greater liberties on when I come and go. Some days I just wander home at 3pm because it's just not happening. Other days I'm there 8-8 and skip lunch because I'm so excited to see a new feature work. I've never been so productive or happy.
ivanhoe 10y ago
I've noticed this when playing chess, which is I guess a pretty good way to measure one's analytical capabilities and concentration. When playing against a computer in the evening after 8+ hours of work my games are significantly weaker; I can't anymore beat the same game level that I easily win in the morning. By looking into game stats I've noticed that in the evenings I make significantly more mistakes, don't see good moves, make hasty decisions more often, etc.
rdlecler1 10y ago
For much of the article the author is saying that with less time to complete a project you now use your time more wisely and you'll get the same amount of work done in a shorter window. If that was the case then managers should instead add 20% more to every project.
rdlecler1 10y ago
For much of the article the author is saying that with less time to complete a project you now use your time more wisely and you'll get the same amount of work done in a shorter window. If that was the case then managers should instead add 20% more to every project. Now you'd be delivering 20% more with the same resources as before. Not buying it.

605 points by itamarst 10y ago

Apreche 10y ago

Recruiters. Find me a company that believes this, and I'll actually reply to you.

existencebox 10y ago
Find me a boss that believes this (and has their own boss believing them/it enough that they don't force them to maintain the status quo) and I'll go work for them and then recruit you. Less jokingly, there are two problems here; one that this sort of embedded culture is very slow to move (especially given that the powers that be are often from prior eras of culture) and secondly that I believe there are actively people of THIS generation who still believe in or at least pay sufficient tribute to the "butts in seats, work long hours" mindset. (I reference family members in finance, and managers I've had at software bigcos in the past spouting such wonderful quotes as 'I can't advocate him (a high performing engineer) for a promotion because he's full remote and it sets a bad precedent' and 'You need to increase your throughput. (me) You realize I'm already working 13 hour days. (him) Work harder.')
- bcrescimanno 10y ago
  > Find me a boss that believes this (and has their own boss believing them/it enough that they don't force them to maintain the status quo) See my HN profile if you're looking for that combo. :)
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    any chance you are looking for fresh grads (in Canada) ?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Many companies are in a mild version of a Malthus/Schumpeter trap. They live on an essentially negotiated resource level that will go down year by year. They've managed to careen into a business model where the income stream is latched and ever so slightly declining. It's like they are an airplane on an engine-out landing. This happens A Lot. I won't say you don't want to work for them, but there's almost no chance of actually innovating or "selling" their way out of this trap. There are two ways out - acquisition and closing the doors.
tarr11 10y ago
Ask them on the interview. It will be a red flag to dysfunctional companies who think you don't want to work hard. Employees at good companies will be proud that they don't overwork.
- actsasbuffoon 10y ago
  This is true in my case. We work 8 hour days, 5 days per week, and I always mention it when interviewing candidates. We're proud of the fact that we can ship a successful product without working the team to constant exhaustion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- shostack 10y ago
  I actually ask on the first call now. Saves a tremendous amount of time.
shostack 10y ago
My company fully believes in this (although many people choose to work more because they are Type A and love their work--their decision). The hard part is convincing candidates we're not BSing them about this, or our benefits. Especially ones from sweat shops that have clearly been scarred by the experience and suspect everyone is lying to them to trap them.
- thedufer 10y ago
  > My company fully believes in this (although many people choose to work more because they are Type A and love their work--their decision). Peer pressure, whether actual or imagined, will keep people from leaving when they should if others are working longer. I have in the past told people to go home even if they wanted to keep working - this is the only way to actually respect the work/life balance of their peers.

dumbfounder 10y ago

Sounds nice, but maybe some evidence would be good?

baptou12 10y ago
"Why does working longer hours not improve the situation? Because working longer makes you less productive at the same time that it encourages bad practices by your boss. Working fewer hours does the opposite."
- dumbfounder 10y ago
  This is evidence? Working fewer hours than what? There is obviously a point where your productivity drops off, but that doesn't mean you are producing less work overall. What I would like to see is tangible evidence. Perhaps analyzing Jira for several companies to see the effort put into projects vs the overall productivity. Maybe set the baseline at the 40 hour week and analyze a few different chunks like 30, 35, 45, 50, and 60 hours per week. Without some sort of analysis like this all we have pure conjecture, and no way to understand where a reasonable cutoff should be.
  - itamarst 10y ago
    There's been research in other fields, at least, not that much in software sadly. See end of http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons for references.
  - Atropos 10y ago
    I agree. Things like having the weekends free and getting enough sleep are really important for having a sustainable working life. But that does not mean working 35 hours per week is a must or 40 hours is a natural limit, for example 9 AM to 8 PM from Monday-Friday is a 50 hour workweek and easily sustainable. The norm in industries like banking, big law firms or management consulting is more like a 60-70 hour work week and while it is obviously not desirable, there are many people who can do it for many years.
10y ago

pc86 10y ago

> Long hours: "It's 5 o'clock and I should be done with work, but I just need to finish this problem, just one more try," you tell yourself. But being tired it actually takes you another three hours to solve. The next day you go to work tired and unfocused. > Shorter hours: "It's 5 o'clock and I wish I had this fixed, but I guess I'll try tomorrow morning." The next morning, refreshed, you solve the problem in 10 minutes. I have too much experience with this. I remember when I was self-employed I humble-brag tweeted about my production deployment ~15 minutes after starting work. A friend of mine asked why I hadn't just deployed last night and the quote above was my first thought (in addition to the fact that you should never deploy to prod then go to bed). I was done with work, so I stopped. It avoids hitting that "grind it out" phase where you're lucky just not to do more harm than good.

overcast 10y ago
This has happened way more times than I can count. Spending hours staring at a line of code, up all night. Wake up next morning, and it's a simple spelling mistake I've missed. Grinding out work has never been productive. Mistakes happen when you're tired. This applies to study cramming as well, and it's completely pointless. Study as much as you can, until your NORMAL bed time, then stop and get a full nights rest before the test. Side note, it's no wonder these big games come riddled with bugs these days. Pushing developers to the extreme during crunch time, just to meet a deadline. There is NO WAY they are doing everything correctly.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  I think it does sometimes work, which is why at last I fall back to it. Grind out fix.. 90% success rate, average time to solve - 1 hour. Sleep and fix in the morning.. 100% success rate, average time to solve - 15 minutes. Clearly better to sleep but if something needs fixed NOW... then it's time to grind I guess...
  - overcast 10y ago
    Well to be fair, we're not talking about emergencies, obviously those get priority. And of course, as much as people would like you to believe, most things are not an emergency!

rabino 10y ago

I was expecting the list of sources at the bottom of the article to be a mile long. Not a single one. Hot damn, so much broscience and red herrings.

ShakataGaNai 10y ago
To be fair, the title wasn't "New study proves that..." or even "Scientists say...". It was very clear that this a blog post written by a dude sharing his own experiences and anecdotes. Not some "proof" that life is better with less hours.
itamarst 10y ago
http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons has a bunch of research in non-software fields cited at the end.

jhummel 10y ago

I started a consulting/services company a few years ago, and this year was finally in a position to start hiring. I'm a big proponent of this type of thinking, so while I couldn't offer the best salary, or the best benefits - I could offer a better work/life balance. I knew it was a win-win for us and the new employee. We landed on a 36 hour work week. 8-5 Mon-Thurs, then 8-12 on Friday. We had more applicants than I ever dreamed of, and scored a great hire that was coming from the 70-hr-a-week startup life. Everyone's been extremely happy over the past six months, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any productivity what-so-ever.

tdees40 10y ago
I've always wondered why more companies don't do this. Offer a 30 or 35 hour work week and watch the top-notch candidates roll in, even though you can't offer a top-notch salary.
- ncallaway 10y ago
  We went more extreme and went to 20 hours a week, though we're a little crazy when it comes to our philosophy about work. It did exactly as you described, though. We're able to attract top talent engineers even though we're a tiny consulting company that nobody has ever heard of.
- ashark 10y ago
  There's a ton of pressure to work more hours, from all over the place. It's way more visible than other metrics. Project fails, the team Fred was leading was averaging 30 hours a week and everyone knows it? Fred's gone, doesn't matter how productive they were, and everyone on that team had better watch out. You tell the client features X and Y aren't gonna make the next deadline before [industry trade show], then client finds out all your people are putting in sub-40-hour weeks? Client's gone and telling anyone who'll listen that your shop is full of entitled, lazy scam artists who will take your money and fail to deliver what you asked for. Flip that, same thing but the teams were averaging 60-hour weeks. It does not matter if that's worse for the product or if it's the cause of the failure, or it two of your best people quit over it—it means "not working enough" is off the table when the blame game comes around, and a smaller chance of getting a pink slip or passed over for a promotion or raise. Any place where this sort of thing isn't a concern is like the eye of a storm—everything around is horrible chaos & destruction and the calm is fragile, precious, and could end at any moment.

us7892 10y ago

Bottom of the article has a link...to learn from your mistakes (perhaps because you worked too many long hours.) We can get emailed a list of his mistakes. https://softwareclown.com/ https://softwareclown.com/

namenotrequired 10y ago

I thought this was about working fewer hours than full time, but apparently it's about working no more than full time.

itamarst 10y ago
OP here: I've actually worked 27 hour work/week, but that's a hard sell given we're in an industry that's trending towards insane hours as the norm. So partially this is just me trying to explain than normal hours are actually better (which is I admit a sad thing to have to explain). But less than full time is even better, yes. For me at least I think 30 hours/week would be the ideal.

shams93 10y ago

Its the Theater of Productivity, similar to the TSA. You can see Meyer's approach to productivity was ultimately just as successful as the TSA on secutity. Yeah doing an early stage startup it could be on the side of a day job so yes you are going to inevtiably put in a lot of hours for $0 doing a startup. But for regular businesses that are well established such as Yahoo this isn't productivity its Productivity Theater in the same way the TSA are Security Theater.

known 10y ago

Not for Non-IT

tonyjstark 10y ago

Of course every personal experience is just anecdotal but since I only work 24 hours a week I feel able to educate myself, do sports, feel more healthy. Before that I worked one week full and one week only 4 days repeatedly and I really got the feeling that coming in on Mondays after a short week was so much easier. I felt more relaxed and satisfied because I could do other stuff on the weekend than trying to catch up with buying things and all that organizational junk you have to do as an adult. Now I work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week and I don't take long breaks anymore. I stopped to read blogs or news at work after lunch, I just work. Would be really interesting if this is just me or if it could be scientifically proven that working less is more.

rdm42116 10y ago
May I ask what industry you work in?
- tonyjstark 10y ago
  I support researchers of the humanities by developing different services like registries and restful apis. But you know, everything has it's cost. I am definitely underpaid but at some point I decided time > money for now.
wineisfine 10y ago
That's right, no man can excel more then 6 hours a day doing great, focused work.
mattm 10y ago
We can't all be Iron Man unfortunately ;)

Noseshine 10y ago

http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-10-26 http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-10-26 Does anybody have time to comment on the article submitted by OP? :)

dsugarman 10y ago

Henry Ford originally found that 40 hour work weeks were optimal for productivity for his factory employees. Before this, they only had one day of rest and were generally overworked and inefficient. I think the work of a factory worker is vastly different than the work we do today behind a computer, especially programmers where your brain power is everything. It would be interesting if a big enough company were to do some proper research on the most efficient working patterns of a programmer today.

sakian 10y ago

How does a company like SpaceX fit into this? They seem to promote the opposite and are seeing some pretty amazing success. Do they succeed because of or despite working long hours?

fluxquanta 10y ago
Maybe I've seen it in the past but I don't remember it now -- what is their employee turnover rate? I imagine they have no shortage of applicants willing to put in 70 hour weeks until they burn out, just to get that name on their CV.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/309990/why_does_spacex_require_such_long_hours_instead/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/309990/why_does_spa...
  - fluxquanta 10y ago
    Fun fact -- I originally wrote "80 hour weeks" in my post and thought, "Nah, that's too much," and bumped it down to 70. Looks like I was way off, haha.
  - projektir 10y ago
    This sort of thing makes it hard for me to respect Elon Musk. He is, personally, doing great things, but I wonder if his overall effect on the world is negative in the long term because he's promoting some views that I find very harmful. So many people around him, who admire him, yet he feels like a one man team.
Noseshine 10y ago
This isn't an absolute. Of course you can do "sprints" successfully. You just can't do it for very long. And we don't know and never will if one or the other problem they had might not have been prevented if the guy designing or making the part had had enough sleep - so it's always a discussion with insufficient data. After all, we've had enough research to show that a lack of sleep impacts the brain, from psychological studies to neuroscience, which now tells us that the brain is actually cleared of toxins during sleep. For the cases who still get enough sleep, well, not sure how the lack of "a live (outside work)" impacts various factors short and long term. For my coding work I have stopped doing certain kinds of coding after evening, basically, anything that isn't "mechanic" but requires design decisions. Even if it's "urgent". Executing what I had decided earlier is okay, but decision making just doesn't work as well for me that late in the day, even if I still feel great. The next morning always seems to bring a fresh perspective.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

stevenwiles 10y ago

> when I was self-employed I humble-brag tweeted about my production deployment ~15 minutes after starting work What a truly bizarre thing to do. You sound like an awful person. Can I ask why you are so self-obsessed?

pc86 10y ago
The kind who doesn't feel the need to make wild assumptions about someone's character based on a single statement while ignoring the larger point.
- stevenwiles 10y ago
  Why did you start your comment with "The kind who..." What question is that supposed to be answering? If I had said something like "What kind of person...." but I said nothing like that. So here, we have more proof of your self-obsession - you don't actually listen to other people, you just hear what you want to hear.
  - random_rr 10y ago
    Stop. This isn't civil or productive.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320482 and marked it off-topic.

mlvljr 10y ago

..and boss's wallet, yeah!

codingdave 10y ago

Even better, drop hours as a metric of work. Offer the flexibility to work whatever hours are most productive... and find a boss who doesn't care whether that is 40 or 20, as long as he gets the value he expects from your time. After all, employment is a business contract. You are given money in exchange for the value you add to the organization. Not hours... value.

softawre 10y ago
You should start a consulting business or startup and offer this.
paulryanrogers 10y ago
Measuring that value precisely may ultimately consume more value than a crude metric like hours.
imh 10y ago
I have heard managers respond that if you can get your responsibilities done in half the time, you should be getting more responsibilities.
- jocro 10y ago
  I'd respond that I'd expect to be getting a requisite increase increase in compensation. At least I hope I would.
  - Salgat 10y ago
    The problem is they directly translate hours in seat to pay, so your logic would make no sense to them.
  - dnh44 10y ago
    Years ago I casually met an owner of a small software company who happened to be hiring, and I was looking for a job. He asked if I was cheap and I instantly answered 'why, are you?' Normally I don't think of witty things like that to say until about a week after the event.

anupshinde 10y ago

I think the key is less-stress and not shorter hours. Meetings, especially long ones, induce stress. I've tried reducing hours (as a freelance remote developer). I cut my working hours to 25 per week from somewhere around 60ish per week. (And I could afford losing out money) At first, I felt I was missing something. I thought it was the money. After being completely off work for a month, I realized I was missing the people (Slack chats, meetings, fire-fights) When I started back with another client, working just 25 hours per week was much much much harder. None of these worked: 8x3days, 4x6days, 6x4days, 5x5days. Few weeks I could not even complete 15 hours, and other weeks I was over-working. I was still stressed. Finally, what worked was odd - (10-12 hours)x2.5 days. So I ended up working a bit more hours than I wanted to. It was proven again that it takes time and focus to pickup momentum and costs a lot more to loose it frequently. And I still work on my other stuff totalling to about 45-50 hour work-weeks and still feels much less stressful.

dnh44 10y ago
Have you tried working when you feel like it (or when you really have to), and just not working when you're not in the mood? I had a three year period working freelance and it was most profitable and fun. I have no clue how many hours I was doing but for the last six months I only worked a few hours a week because I was able to automate most of my work. I'm doing a startup now and this lifestyle wouldn't be acceptable to my partners so it's back to a 9-late schedule plus weekends. I'm nowhere near as productive and strongly feel like I'm accomplishing less, but to go back to working how I like would just cause conflicts.
- anupshinde 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I do not have such luxury. I do have flexibility within a work-week. i.e. I could be working on client project on MTW or FSS or in between, but I prefer doing much work within Tue-Fri. Fortunately, I have been with one very good client working on challenging stuff yet does not have tight deadlines. It is a risky strategy to stay with just one client - but I am not worried too much about it now. Since its billable hours, I don't see automation would help reduce my hours - it increases efficiency though. I tried a startup with some partners and recommended a flexible schedule, but unfortunately partners got too flexible and it never took off. It is better to slog and make others do that in a startup.

mastratton3 10y ago

I agree with the fact about cutting out meetings but I don't know if I agree with everything here. While its easy to say "Just leave at 5pm and come back refreshed" is easy to say, I found personally to have learned to most on the days when I've worked until 2am really digging into a problem and getting it fixed. I also have found that the best people I've worked with have a similar get it done attitude. Obviously this isn't sustainable but I think required from time to time. I also think this lacks the notion of "how much do you want to move up vs stay in your current role". If you don't have any desire for more responsibilities than this applies, but I think if you want to move up/learn new skills, reducing the hours works against you. I guess I follow the mantra of, "The first 40 should be productive and for the employer in the role I was hired for but I should spend additional time on top of that learning new skills"

rdm42116 10y ago
And I have found that tired employees make huge mistakes on customer critical systems. I have also found that some people are extremely successful working insane hours. They have the capacity to, either it's their personality or they're still young and single. To think that applies to everyone is the issue. Not everyone can work tired and produce good work or do a good job. Would you want someone tired working dangerous machinery just to get something done? We would all be against that. Yes, it's pretty well established that to move up hours must be put in. The reason this topic comes up time and time again is because no one asks the question why nor do they prove that these hours translate to better work or more productivity. I've seen insane hours in third party consultants. They mess up. A lot.
jtrtoo 10y ago
There's nothing wrong with working later / longer from time to time, particularly when you're hyper-focused on a problem. But making a habit of it -- or doing it out of obligation -- could be a sign that something is off (e.g. with one's time management or organizational skills, with one's life balance / priorities, or one's employer).

ErikAugust 10y ago

Tired is the worst time to code. There are other things you can do to be productive - but try not writing mission critical code when you are exhausted.

imh 10y ago

>There are companies where this won't fly, of course, where management is so bad or norms are so out of whack that even a 40-hour work week by a productive team member won't be acceptable. In those cases you need to look for a new job, and as part of the interview figure out the work culture and project management practices of prospective employers. Do people work short hours or long hours? Is everything always on fire or do projects get delivered on time? I have never figured out how to ask this. It always feels like I'm asking, "I don't like to work much, is that ok with you?"

toolz 10y ago
Well, that's the thing, you aren't really asking. You form the demand as a question to allow for negotiation, so it's not really a question. You should always try to walk into a negotiation from a position of power. It's an art form that is hugely valuable for getting what you want though, and you shouldn't feel bad about trying to get what you want. If you make your life better through negotiation then you might give someone else the confidence to put themselves in a better position. I'm not saying you should pretend your actions are altruistic, but don't blind yourself to the positives that can come from you trying to get what you want.
- mamarjan 10y ago
  Sounds a bit complicated, but it's true. It's all about negotiation. I negotiated lower hours a month ago. After almost 3 years on a project, asked to go down to 20hrs/week. As I see it, I have proved I'm trustworthy and that I can contribute significant value to the project even with lower hours. In addition, my position of power was that I had some cash and other options, in case the other party refuses. This is actually something that keeps happening to me. I show my value and that I'm trustworthy, and get anything I want, be it working from home, lower hours, or both.
martincmartin 10y ago
Its tricky. I usually wait until near the end of the interview, after I've asked a bunch of questions, especially when they say "do you have any other questions?" Then I say, "Hmm. What is work/life balance like at X?" I used to wait until the end of the full-day interview, but many times found out I'd wasted a day on a company that I wouldn't want to work for. So now I do it at the end of the phone screen.

yodsanklai 10y ago

The most (professionally) successful persons I know worked very hard at least at some point in their life. For instance, I know tons of professors that pretty much work all the time. Same thing with former schoolmates working in finance now. I'm not saying it's the road to follow, and obviously, not all careers are comparable, but I think that in order to reach their full potential, people have to (and can) work a lot.

Noseshine 10y ago
Just a few days ago I read an article or blog entry - which I may even have found through a comment on HN? - where a successful important person described the reunions with the people he had studied with over 20 years. At first everybody was so amazingly successful, great wife, then great kids, all doing very well, financially too. But after 10 years with each reunion less and less people showed up. Those who were missing had no wife and family left and didn't want their old pals to know how their personal lives had faltered. You only mention careers...? Please report overall long-term life success that includes the family :) Also, since you mention finance, while they personally benefited, and their industry did too, what about the rest of society? Does the latest microsecond computer trading algorithm really benefit mankind overall? So to summarize, the questions I have are about 1) individual success not just "career", "financial" and "short term", and 2) that individual success from the perspective of society.
- yodsanklai 10y ago
  As I said, I didn't want to mean that everybody should work hard or that professional success is the only important thing. But I think that in order to succeed in a competitive field, one has too work hard and it's definitely doable. That being said, I'm an advocate of less working hours and more vacation. I worked in the US for a couple of years, and this is the one thing that made me go back to Europe. Free time is the most important thing in my opinion.
  - rdm42116 10y ago
    But how do you define "success?"

gthtjtkt 10y ago

> One programmer I know made clear when she started a job at a startup that she worked 40-45 hours a week and that's it. Everyone else worked much longer hours, but that was her personal limit. Personally I have negotiated a 35-hour work week. Wow, what a depressing time to be employed. The old standard (35 hours) is now considered a "short" workweek, and only the most desirable employees have the leverage to request it. Not to mention stagnant wages, rapidly rising costs of living, and off-hour availability expectations. How did we end up here?

clw8 10y ago
Pointy Haired Bosses
softawre 10y ago
Where are you working? My team works 40 hours max (never overtime over the 3 years I've been the lead). We make great money for the Midwest.
- gthtjtkt 10y ago
  Small dev team at a non-tech company on the east coast, so all these nifty Silicon Valley management practices are unheard of here. At our company, you're lucky if you don't have to clock out and in for your lunch break... And I'm not one of those "most desirable" employees I mentioned earlier, so I'd be very lucky if I could negotiate for better hours or more vacation.
- flinty 10y ago
  What city? Thinking about moving from the northeast. Trying to figure out some options.
danharaj 10y ago
Labor and capital are in constant conflict. Labor basically died as a cohesive international movement by the 80's. Labor-hating ideology has dominated economic thought for decades.
crdoconnor 10y ago

bcrescimanno 10y ago

Just this week, I've been collecting feedback from my team. Some of the most powerful I received was, "Since you took over, I feel like I've gotten more done with so much less stress and extra hours. Until you came in, I didn't believe that we could really have work-life-balance and be MORE productive and now I know we can." Having been in companies where my approach has been called everything from "lazy" to outright "damaging," this feedback was both rewarding and validating. Edit: For those who are in jobs where you're putting in those long hours, I can tell you there are managers out there who believe in the message here. I have three of them working for me right now and I constantly reinforce the philosophy of working sustainably. Don't settle for less than a manager who respects you the person--not just you the engineer!

ncallaway 10y ago
Totally agree. We're running a team with engineers working 20 hours a week. That seems like about the amount of "productive engineering time" that most people have in them in a week, regardless of how many hours they actually spend working. It's a bit of an experiment, but I have to say that I'm really happy with what it's doing for us. Our engineers are still quite productive. Their work life balance is good, so we can avoid burnout (though this will take a long time to actually prove). And, finally, it gives us a _huge_ competitive advantage when it comes to hiring top quality engineers.
- yojex 10y ago
  Would you mind letting us know where this is?
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    Sure. We're a small consulting company called Apsis Labs (http://apsis.io/ http://apsis.io/). We started in Seattle, although our hiring has been entirely remote across the US and Canada.
    - talmand 10y ago

jsprogrammer 10y ago

Good article, but I don't see where it addresses how working fewer hours is good for your boss (though, you can try to read in to it). The article even says that it (working less hours) won't work at some companies.

dasil003 10y ago

Having spent a lot of time both as a manager and as an individual contributor, here's the rub (at least for programmers): software developers are a classic market for lemons. The bigger the org and the more operational complexity the more space there is for poor developers to hide out and draw a pay check. But even at a small scale it's remarkably difficult to measure productivity actually. Therefore, what you need is intrinsic motivation. You need engineers who really care about solving the right problem at the right time in the right way. 35 hours or 70 doesn't matter if they can't get that right, and it's very hard to have management that is qualified to make that judgement on people (especially as an org grows and management becomes a full time job). So the problem is that given this opacity, finding someone who works 70 hours a week is a better proxy than someone who seems excited about a 35-hour work week—the former are people who are clearly driven whereas the latter are literally everyone. It's far from a good metric, but perhaps the best one available to the pointy hairs of the world. Speaking from personal experience, it wasn't until I had a kid that I found out what I could do in a 40-hour week. Once I had that time constraint, it forced me to be more efficient in a very deep and fundamental way from the core of my being. When I was 25 I would hit 5pm and think to myself: I still have another 8 hours to solve this problem before bed. Perhaps this is post-hoc justification, but I think that makes sense when you are just starting out and not really competent yet. Once you've passed the magic 10k hours or whatever, I think turning over problems in ones subconscious can provide a lot more of the value. So sleep / exercise / meditation can all help elevate your performance far more than extra hours—but only if your brain knows what it's doing.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
In my experience the lemons have no problem working 70 hour weeks; they weren't working that hard to begin with and know that they need to appear productive since they can't be productive. Whereas employees who are productive are tired after 35 hours or want to get home and work on side projects. Long work hours actually select for lemons.
itamarst 10y ago
Well, but here's the thing: you've figured out that you're more productive on shorter hours. So really you want to prevent those people who work long hours from doing so, because they'll actually do better. Not much research in sofware AFAIK, but there's a bunch of research in other fields showing maximal output is at 40 hours a week, with rapid fall-off at longer working hours. See http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons So it's your job as a manager to prevent burn out and maximize output by encouraging people not to work too long.

Abdizriel 10y ago

I agree with that. Last ~1-2hours in job I feel bored and everything is not so productive than it should. I would like to work in/create place where engineers work for ~30h a week including lunch/coffee time. I think with that kind of work everyone would be happy and could easly balance work/life

SonicSoul 10y ago

There is no science here what so-ever. Just a bunch of feel good rah rah BS about working less hours and getting more done. Some fodder to go to your manager with I guess. Who said that 35-40 hours is optimal? How can you even quantify it considering every job is different. I've had jobs where 50% was brainless support so i'd work 10-12 hr days and my brain was totally fine to keep going. Some jobs come with inevitable social BS that will take 50% of your time anyway. The problem is that management and developers have different incentives. Managers [in more cases then not] are pushed by executives to justify their worth and deliver results. Developers want to create, but also don't care as much about the bottom line. They want to have a life outside of work. It's that simple. Let's not go pretending like anything beyond 40 hours takes 10x time to get done because it simply doesn't. It's just an empty thing to say like "you should give me a raise because of inflation". There are plenty of people working their own startups doing 80-100 hr weeks and getting shit ton done. Does it mean that you should do this at a corporation? Maybe not, maybe yes. It all depends on the trade offs either side is willing to make. Managers will of course be incentivized to push for more productivity per employee. Places such as Basecamp take a stance against this incentive gap. They're actively working at making employees take more vacation, sleep better, and have a better work life balance. This must improve employee morale and retention. No idea what it does to bottom line or employee paychecks. As a manger I've had people that worked 40- hrs and delivered amazing results. I'd never even think about caring how many hours they've put in. Then there were others that worked more but delivered a mound of technical debt or nothing at all. They were usually the ones most vocal about working too many hours. There are very few people out there that can come in, get straight to work, and deliver quality. Simply making a blank statement that they will do more by working less is silly.

meddlepal 10y ago
I agree strongly with the idea that "40 hours" is just as made up as "15 hours" or whatever. We need actual data to draw any conclusions here. Similarly we haven't explored all the ways we can make people more productive either. Maybe if the employees who feel tired after six hours could take a long nap mid-day they'd be able to work 12 hours a day at a high level. That said I'm on the work what you feel comfortable working and as long as goals are being met then it doesn't matter.

afarrell 10y ago

This also applies if you are in university. Your ability to learn is directly related to the quality of sleep you have gotten. If your school believes "sleep is for the weak" and makes labs due at 6am, please realise that this is bullshit and find tools/habits to enforce a different discipline.

tbihl 10y ago
I remember when I realized in my introductory circuits class that all the problems were just puzzles, and sleep beats the hell out of studying when it comes to preparing for puzzles.

mindfulgeek 10y ago

The best "full time" work environment I experienced was a 9-5 week with morning/afternoon 3-hour coding blocks (no interruptions tolerated) and an hour lunch. The other hour was spent in the standup, email, one-off conversations and blogging/community work. We were a highly production and creative team.

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

Yeah.... not so much for me. I'm going to give an alternate point of view. To become world class at something, you need to be obsessed. You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing. "Oh but you won't be as effective after 8 hours of work!" So what. Let's say I'm only 20% as effective after 8 hours. I'll take it -- 20% of the last 5-6 hours of the day towards my craft over 0% doing 'normal' things (drinks on the patio? Pointless travelling? Whatever my fellow annoying millenials like to do). This is the kind of mindset you need to reach the top of a field. And it should develop naturally, you should really want it. Whether it means outdoing everyone at your company, getting that prototype done two months earlier, closing more leads, getting that tricky piano passage, whatever. If you love what you're doing, more is more. Because you probably can't help yourself. If you feel like working more, just do it. Don't let normal social expectations hold you back, especially if you're young, because you only get so long to become great at something. I'll finish with one final caveat. Figure out what level of sleep, exercise, and nutrition your body needs to sustain your desired work habits. Get those right ASAP, keep trying modifications, and realize it's different for everyone's unique biology. I like 8 hours of sleep a night, weightlifting 3x/week at 45-60mins each, and a certain amount of protein and certain vitamins (and coffee of course, ha). You'd be surprised how these 3 lifestyle factors can make such a huge difference in your energy levels and hormones -- one can literally become a different person!

clifanatic 10y ago
> You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing. I guess that depends on what you consider "work". I do programming stuff in exchange for money, and it's not always the programming stuff I want to do. When I'm not working I do programming stuff (or read about programming stuff) I do want to do, but not in exchange for money.
projektir 10y ago
This tends to be a non-issue, though. If you really love what you're doing that much, then it makes sense, and you are running off of additional energy. This doesn't apply for, I would say, 99% of people, though, and definitely should not be influencing policies or standard hiring.

fizixer 10y ago

In my experience, in order to maximize the productivity in creative work and still work 40 hours, you have to pick the best 40 hours out of a 168 hour time frame: - If it means you work '13 hours 20 minutes' on Monday Wednesday Friday, so be it. - If it means you work '5 hours 45 minutes' Monday thru Sunday, so be it. - If it means you work one way one week, the other way the next week, so be it. - If you work best in the middle of the night, so be it. - If it means you work 10 hours everyday for 52 days straight, and take the rest of the quarter off (39 days!), so be it. The problem is, we have to do this thing called 'work/life balance' in which we are at work 9 to 5, whether we feel fresh or tired, and have to forget about work for the remaining 128 hours. Combine that with the need for in-person interaction with the team, the boss, and what not, it gets worse. IMO you can't have it both ways.

aledalgrande 10y ago

I find that, for boring tasks or everyday work, this is true. I cannot use "turbo mode" for too long. But if there is something really challenging in which I plunged in, and at the same time I am getting results, it will break the rule. I think much of what written here makes sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_for_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_f... Also, if you really want to be productive, it's not about sleep, but about having very defined and organized tasks, so you limit the number of open decisions you have to take in a day.

atom-morgan 10y ago

Imagine trying to convince a slave master that freedom, in the long run, will lead to more productivity on a scale that they can't even imagine. I believe working fewer hours is a modern day version of that.

nathan_f77 10y ago

Right now I'm working 20 hours per week as a contractor. It's beautiful. My hours are also pretty flexible. If I'm really in the zone, I can work a 10 hour day. That's what I did today. I started at 3pm, had a break around 7pm, and I just finished what I was working on at 2am (30 minutes ago). Yesterday, I wasn't feeling motivated at all, so I just ended up taking the day off and doing something else. I'm living in Thailand, so normally I'll work from 10pm until 2am, so I have overlap with clients in the US. I wake up at 10am, and it feels like I have the whole day to do whatever I like. I'm earning less money, but I'm somehow saving much more than I did in San Francisco.

dasmoth 10y ago
The implication of those hours is that you go to bed pretty soon after finishing work -- how easy do you find it to wind down on a schedule?
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  Yes, that's right. I take about 30 minutes to read or watch something, but I usually find it very easy to fall asleep.

jupiter90000 10y ago

There are certain jobs where it may not work, but from what I've seen places I've worked, 40hr workweeks seem like a holdover from some, in my opinion, truly bizarre cultural expectations. I mean, at some offices I've worked people are basically shooting the breeze for at least 10 hours at the office a week with coworkers. Some of them don't like being at home with their families and so seem to think work is a way to get away from their responsibilities outside of work. I'd rather have that 'time bullshitting with coworkers' to do things I like to do not at work. Is this some holdover from previous generations of just wanting to pressure everyone to do what they had to do? Sure, sometimes things need to get done, but alot of jobs aren't saving lives or doing much amazing, but "hit that deadline or we're going to die" is almost the implication made in business in the US in my experience... Hopefully we'll stop this work addiction some day and realize lots of things can get done without making people be behind a desk an arbitrary number of hours per day...

mattm 10y ago
> Some of them don't like being at home with their families I've noticed this as well. The people who worked the longest hours did so because they didn't like going home.

ShakataGaNai 10y ago

This is one of the reasons why more telecommuting/remote work is "better". Since you've got no boss looking (literally) over your shoulder, you can't be judged on hours. Then things like output or project completion actually bubble to the top as most important.

tzakrajs 10y ago

The key to this article at a macroscopic level is the willingness to quit when the manager or culture are unwilling to adapt to your fewer hours proposition. We can positively change the industry for everyone by uniformly following this guidanace.

franciscop 10y ago

I thought this was about reducing it from 40h to 30h or so, but it was about fighting for the 40h themselves. I am in Japan now and things are really crazy here for my friends.

zooko4 10y ago

Hey, I know the guy who wrote this! As a boss, and in fact as the former boss of itamarst, I agree with this strategy. I want employees to produce high-quality work, to be predictable in their pace, to not get burnt out, and to be happy and pleasant to work with.

zooko4 10y ago

Waterluvian 10y ago

I've been fortunate enough that my employer encourages people to find the patterns that work for them. Now that I've been there a few years, I've been taking greater liberties on when I come and go. Some days I just wander home at 3pm because it's just not happening. Other days I'm there 8-8 and skip lunch because I'm so excited to see a new feature work. I've never been so productive or happy.

ivanhoe 10y ago

I've noticed this when playing chess, which is I guess a pretty good way to measure one's analytical capabilities and concentration. When playing against a computer in the evening after 8+ hours of work my games are significantly weaker; I can't anymore beat the same game level that I easily win in the morning. By looking into game stats I've noticed that in the evenings I make significantly more mistakes, don't see good moves, make hasty decisions more often, etc.

rdlecler1 10y ago

For much of the article the author is saying that with less time to complete a project you now use your time more wisely and you'll get the same amount of work done in a shorter window. If that was the case then managers should instead add 20% more to every project.

rdlecler1 10y ago