8 ms·

Yeah, I'd like to see some actual data. Some kind of scientific study, anything. I don't say this because I'm a proponent of work-at-any-cost culture -- I'm n

Yeah, I'd like to see some actual data. Some kind of scientific study, anything. I don't say this because I'm a proponent of work-at-any-cost culture -- I'm not. I work about 45 hours a week, no weekends or nights outside of rare emergencies. That's certainly good for my mood and my relationship with my family and so forth. But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking. The universe does not often line up to give us win-wins like this. My belief is that, probably, for at least a lot of people, if you spend a few years working super hard, you'll probably gain a lot of skill and be highly productive. Maybe if you keep that up for decades, accumulated stress will make it a net negative. Maybe some people have really low tolerance for stress and will much more rapidly turn to net negative. But the idea that it is universally or near-universally true that everyone is more productive on a 40 hour week is at best under-argued, and, I'd guess, probably mostly untrue.

DougN7 10y ago
Completely agree. And the fact that the breaking point is a nice round 40, which just happens to correspond with our culture's 5-day work week and typical 8 hour day is a little too convenient to believe.
- creatine_lizard 10y ago
  The standard argument is that it is the other way around -- we've settled on a 8x5 scheme _because_ our breaking point is around 40 hours. However, like others in this thread, I'm not sure I agree.
  - orangutango 10y ago
    Whose standard argument? I always thought: we work 40 hours a week because we work 8 hours a day; and we work 8 hours a day because Robert Owen's mantra "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest" caught on.
- lazerwalker 10y ago
  The apocryphal story I've heard is that the 5-day / 8-hour workweek came from Henry Ford doing rigorous research on productivity in his factories (and that 40 hours/week was less than the norm at the time). I'd believe that's true, but I'd also believe there's reason to suggest that what holds for factory workers doesn't hold for information economy workers. (Although anecdotally, I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days.)
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    >I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days. I'm glad someone else has noticed this. The fact that I still end up feeling burned out if I constantly work 8 hour days has made me feel very lazy. It's weird, I feel like I can work at top speed all the time if I work 6 hour days, but if I try to maintain that same pace with longer days then I hit a wall. In effect, I need to pace myself to work 8 hour days. The only time I feel like I need a day longer than 6 hours is when I'm in meetings all day. Meetings and working seem to use two different kinds of energy. So I could meet for 3 hours about something and work for 6 hours just fine, but I'd be wasting my time if I was attending 3 hours of meetings each day. The thought above pretty much reinforces my belief that the hours we work have nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with an illusion of fairness. My boss spends more than half his day in meetings. It probably wouldn't look good if I was working 3 hours less than him each day just because I don't have as many meetings to attend. The issue is even trickier when I consider the fact that many of my coworkers need less concentration to perform their roles, and would be perfectly fine working 5x10s by their own admission.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  I believe it. The breaking point is at 40 because the breakdown is in part a sub-conscious negotiation strategy. Like, some folks will get angered by being pressured into washing the dishes, and things magically break and they no longer get pressured into washing the dishes. Similarly, getting pressured into sacrificing your work-life balance can cause the sorts of emotions that are way better for winning those social conflicts than writing good code.
- dahart 10y ago
  Were you joking or serious? Cause seriously- this is a good joke, if it's a joke! Otherwise, yeah, it's not a coincidence. ;)
- tikhonj 10y ago
  I doubt the breaking point is 40, but 40 seems close. I remember looking through studies on the matter[1] and seeing numbers floating around between 35–45 hours/week. It's hard to generalize because productivity is hard to measure and behaves differently in different cultures and professions, but I am willing to believe that the breaking point for most people is within 10—15% of 40 hours/week. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit lower... [1]: Unfortunately I don't have them handy, and they had some clear limitations. If I'm remembering correctly, some were about relatively unskilled work and none were about programming, where measuring productivity is an open problem.
dpark 10y ago
It's anecdotally untrue. The most successful people I know work a lot of hours. I don't advocate it because I don't think it's healthy on a personal level but it's certainly an effective strategy to gain an advantage in the workplace and generally just get more stuff done.
- tirant 10y ago
  Then the issue is with your definition of successful. If you only main for professional success, indeed, working more hours will put you at advantage. But having been with already some people on their last days of life, I don't remember any of them regretting of not having spend more time working, but always of having had more time with family and friends.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Clearly the definition here is success at work. Working long hours is unlikely to improve anyone's home situation unless they're impoverished and earning hourly wages or have a home environment so horrible that being at work is preferable.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      You said "most successful people". That doesn't clearly mean at work.
      - dpark 10y ago
        The entire comment thread is about success at work. Aetherson used the word "work" 3 times and was clearly discussing the impact of working long hours on success in the workplace. Willfully ignoring context to try to make your point isn't clever.
- muzster 10y ago
  >> The most successful people I know work a lot of hours. That's also anecdotally untrue.
adamnemecek 10y ago
> But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking. This is extremely activity dependent I think.
barrkel 10y ago
The article actually talks about using that time to work on things other than what your day job is about.
dahart 10y ago
Here's some data & has a bunch of references to more data. http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf The claim is not that 40 is some kind of hard threshold, and if you work any more than that you'll be instantly less productive. The claim is that a steady-state of, say, 60 hours per week is less productive long term. It's actually more productive for a little while, like a month, but then people get tired and less productive than rested 40-hour workers after that. I have experience doing long periods of 80 hour weeks, when I was working in game development. I think it's hard to say definitively that productivity goes negative, that's not what it felt like when we were crunching. OTOH, I did watch as tired crews would make bad decisions during crunch that ended up costing time in the long run, and I can definitely say that 80 hour weeks are not twice as productive as 40 hour weeks.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  But even if 80 weeks ends up with only a 50 hour per worker per week extra benefit, because everyone is paid salary and it doesn't cost the corporation an extra penny to make people work 80 hour weeks, there's not any incentive for them not to push for it, unless people quit, but when you're working 80 hour weeks it can be hard to find the energy to hunt for a new job (and people start feeling like they have to do it, because whatever bullshit reasons have been provided), so people don't punish the employer by quitting anywhere near as much as they should.
  - dahart 10y ago
    Agreed, there's often not enough incentive for companies to not do it, and people don't quit often enough - both were true in the cases where I've worked lots of overtime. That said, productivity during extended 80 hour week crunches may well dip below 40 and be a net drag on the company, but it probably still wouldn't matter. Game studios in particular aren't asking themselves whether it's worth it to crunch, they don't know whether crunch is more or less productive and they don't care. They look at a looming deadline that appears to take 3x more work than there is time left. Publishers attach bonuses to being on time, and fees to being late. Crunch is often seen as the only option. That shouldn't be true at the huge game companies, but it still is. Plus, it is really hard to measure true productivity in a non-factory setting like software. Nobody actually knows if 80 hours per week sustained equals 50 or 30 or 70 or 10. All that said, a true 80 hour work week doesn't leave enough time & energy to eat properly, see your family, or even watch TV, let alone job hunt. I'm the kind of person that always does extra work, or has side projects going, but I realized at some point during game crunches that I was trading money for my entire life, and nobody can pay me enough to work 80 hours a week.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
It's comments like this that really make me sad about the state of labor solidarity among tech professionals. Like, please, stop torpedoing our negotiation position, especially on a public forum that many technical employers and managers read. On the object level, I have a suspicion that being productive past 40 hr/wk or so has reverse causation for me. It's bad for me to work over 40 hours a week, so that magically translates into being bad at it. Social negotiation is one of those things that your non-verbal and emotional parts is really good at, and Thomas Schelling style "don't have the ability to do things you don't want others to pressure you into doing" strategies work.
- johansch 10y ago
  Do you realize that you're basically saying: "shut up with your facts, we've got a way of [easy hipster] living to protect"?
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    No, he is saying, you need to pace yourself. Don't burn out in your twenties. Most of you won't make your life better by working 80 hrs/week but you make life worse for a lot of people.
    - johansch 10y ago
      That's indeed something to think of.. but that's not what the poster wrote.
  - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
    You sound like you're either management or the kind of person who's first to cross picket lines. Anyhow, take out the vitriol and your statement is basically "do you realize that you're supporting the quality of life of software developers?" Yes. Yes I am. I'm a software developer and this stuff is important. I'm opposed to moving towards a negotiated position that gives employers more at the expense of software developers. These are not unreasonable positions to hold. editing to add in a quote from parent downthread: >yes, I was in some mid-management level Keep that in mind as you read comments.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I think the real problem is that most of us spend the first 40 hours of a week on dull stuff and politics and don't learn anything. I think we should fix that first before doing more work in the evening.

DougN7 10y ago

Completely agree. And the fact that the breaking point is a nice round 40, which just happens to correspond with our culture's 5-day work week and typical 8 hour day is a little too convenient to believe.

creatine_lizard 10y ago
The standard argument is that it is the other way around -- we've settled on a 8x5 scheme _because_ our breaking point is around 40 hours. However, like others in this thread, I'm not sure I agree.
- orangutango 10y ago
  Whose standard argument? I always thought: we work 40 hours a week because we work 8 hours a day; and we work 8 hours a day because Robert Owen's mantra "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest" caught on.
lazerwalker 10y ago
The apocryphal story I've heard is that the 5-day / 8-hour workweek came from Henry Ford doing rigorous research on productivity in his factories (and that 40 hours/week was less than the norm at the time). I'd believe that's true, but I'd also believe there's reason to suggest that what holds for factory workers doesn't hold for information economy workers. (Although anecdotally, I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days.)
- Declanomous 10y ago
  >I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days. I'm glad someone else has noticed this. The fact that I still end up feeling burned out if I constantly work 8 hour days has made me feel very lazy. It's weird, I feel like I can work at top speed all the time if I work 6 hour days, but if I try to maintain that same pace with longer days then I hit a wall. In effect, I need to pace myself to work 8 hour days. The only time I feel like I need a day longer than 6 hours is when I'm in meetings all day. Meetings and working seem to use two different kinds of energy. So I could meet for 3 hours about something and work for 6 hours just fine, but I'd be wasting my time if I was attending 3 hours of meetings each day. The thought above pretty much reinforces my belief that the hours we work have nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with an illusion of fairness. My boss spends more than half his day in meetings. It probably wouldn't look good if I was working 3 hours less than him each day just because I don't have as many meetings to attend. The issue is even trickier when I consider the fact that many of my coworkers need less concentration to perform their roles, and would be perfectly fine working 5x10s by their own admission.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
I believe it. The breaking point is at 40 because the breakdown is in part a sub-conscious negotiation strategy. Like, some folks will get angered by being pressured into washing the dishes, and things magically break and they no longer get pressured into washing the dishes. Similarly, getting pressured into sacrificing your work-life balance can cause the sorts of emotions that are way better for winning those social conflicts than writing good code.
dahart 10y ago
Were you joking or serious? Cause seriously- this is a good joke, if it's a joke! Otherwise, yeah, it's not a coincidence. ;)
tikhonj 10y ago
I doubt the breaking point is 40, but 40 seems close. I remember looking through studies on the matter[1] and seeing numbers floating around between 35–45 hours/week. It's hard to generalize because productivity is hard to measure and behaves differently in different cultures and professions, but I am willing to believe that the breaking point for most people is within 10—15% of 40 hours/week. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit lower... [1]: Unfortunately I don't have them handy, and they had some clear limitations. If I'm remembering correctly, some were about relatively unskilled work and none were about programming, where measuring productivity is an open problem.

dpark 10y ago

It's anecdotally untrue. The most successful people I know work a lot of hours. I don't advocate it because I don't think it's healthy on a personal level but it's certainly an effective strategy to gain an advantage in the workplace and generally just get more stuff done.

tirant 10y ago
Then the issue is with your definition of successful. If you only main for professional success, indeed, working more hours will put you at advantage. But having been with already some people on their last days of life, I don't remember any of them regretting of not having spend more time working, but always of having had more time with family and friends.
- dpark 10y ago
  Clearly the definition here is success at work. Working long hours is unlikely to improve anyone's home situation unless they're impoverished and earning hourly wages or have a home environment so horrible that being at work is preferable.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    You said "most successful people". That doesn't clearly mean at work.
    - dpark 10y ago
      The entire comment thread is about success at work. Aetherson used the word "work" 3 times and was clearly discussing the impact of working long hours on success in the workplace. Willfully ignoring context to try to make your point isn't clever.
muzster 10y ago
>> The most successful people I know work a lot of hours. That's also anecdotally untrue.

adamnemecek 10y ago

> But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking. This is extremely activity dependent I think.

barrkel 10y ago

The article actually talks about using that time to work on things other than what your day job is about.

dahart 10y ago

Here's some data & has a bunch of references to more data. http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf The claim is not that 40 is some kind of hard threshold, and if you work any more than that you'll be instantly less productive. The claim is that a steady-state of, say, 60 hours per week is less productive long term. It's actually more productive for a little while, like a month, but then people get tired and less productive than rested 40-hour workers after that. I have experience doing long periods of 80 hour weeks, when I was working in game development. I think it's hard to say definitively that productivity goes negative, that's not what it felt like when we were crunching. OTOH, I did watch as tired crews would make bad decisions during crunch that ended up costing time in the long run, and I can definitely say that 80 hour weeks are not twice as productive as 40 hour weeks.

cableshaft 10y ago
But even if 80 weeks ends up with only a 50 hour per worker per week extra benefit, because everyone is paid salary and it doesn't cost the corporation an extra penny to make people work 80 hour weeks, there's not any incentive for them not to push for it, unless people quit, but when you're working 80 hour weeks it can be hard to find the energy to hunt for a new job (and people start feeling like they have to do it, because whatever bullshit reasons have been provided), so people don't punish the employer by quitting anywhere near as much as they should.
- dahart 10y ago
  Agreed, there's often not enough incentive for companies to not do it, and people don't quit often enough - both were true in the cases where I've worked lots of overtime. That said, productivity during extended 80 hour week crunches may well dip below 40 and be a net drag on the company, but it probably still wouldn't matter. Game studios in particular aren't asking themselves whether it's worth it to crunch, they don't know whether crunch is more or less productive and they don't care. They look at a looming deadline that appears to take 3x more work than there is time left. Publishers attach bonuses to being on time, and fees to being late. Crunch is often seen as the only option. That shouldn't be true at the huge game companies, but it still is. Plus, it is really hard to measure true productivity in a non-factory setting like software. Nobody actually knows if 80 hours per week sustained equals 50 or 30 or 70 or 10. All that said, a true 80 hour work week doesn't leave enough time & energy to eat properly, see your family, or even watch TV, let alone job hunt. I'm the kind of person that always does extra work, or has side projects going, but I realized at some point during game crunches that I was trading money for my entire life, and nobody can pay me enough to work 80 hours a week.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago

It's comments like this that really make me sad about the state of labor solidarity among tech professionals. Like, please, stop torpedoing our negotiation position, especially on a public forum that many technical employers and managers read. On the object level, I have a suspicion that being productive past 40 hr/wk or so has reverse causation for me. It's bad for me to work over 40 hours a week, so that magically translates into being bad at it. Social negotiation is one of those things that your non-verbal and emotional parts is really good at, and Thomas Schelling style "don't have the ability to do things you don't want others to pressure you into doing" strategies work.

johansch 10y ago
Do you realize that you're basically saying: "shut up with your facts, we've got a way of [easy hipster] living to protect"?
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  No, he is saying, you need to pace yourself. Don't burn out in your twenties. Most of you won't make your life better by working 80 hrs/week but you make life worse for a lot of people.
  - johansch 10y ago
    That's indeed something to think of.. but that's not what the poster wrote.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  You sound like you're either management or the kind of person who's first to cross picket lines. Anyhow, take out the vitriol and your statement is basically "do you realize that you're supporting the quality of life of software developers?" Yes. Yes I am. I'm a software developer and this stuff is important. I'm opposed to moving towards a negotiated position that gives employers more at the expense of software developers. These are not unreasonable positions to hold. editing to add in a quote from parent downthread: >yes, I was in some mid-management level Keep that in mind as you read comments.

maxxxxx 10y ago

I think the real problem is that most of us spend the first 40 hours of a week on dull stuff and politics and don't learn anything. I think we should fix that first before doing more work in the evening.