8 ms·

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people

by edanm 9y ago

As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least). For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong? The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense? You can think it's exploitation to ask people to work hard, but this is to work on a team with a world-class researcher who most people would love to work with. Is it too much work for some people? Sure. Are there others for whom it is worth the trade-off? Probably. Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Working really hard is a totally legit and rational choice under some circumstances. (Btw, worth pointing out that this article is at least partly a pitch for a book about working less hours. Not saying this invalidates its points, but it is certainly taking advantage of the publicity Andrew Ng's post has gotten to sell a product).

richardknop 9y ago
If you are expecting me to work extra hours you will have to pay multiple of my normal rate for overtime. I'm sorry but anything else is some form of exploitation or at the very least unfair. And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of hours invested time in them. I choose to work on them for free because they interest me. If you want me to spend that extra time working on the company instead then don't expect me to do it for free. You are basically asking to own my free time which is ridiculous. Overtimes and their compensation should be clearly defined in the contract, otherwise you can't expect to take employees' free unpaid time outside of work hours.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  I think GPs point was that people can clearly be productive more than 40 hours a week because so many are. How people should be compensated for their time is only loosely coupled with how many hours they can work. I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.
  - richardknop 9y ago
    You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them. However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week. So even if you can be productive for 70 hours per week, I wouldn't do it and instead invest that time in your family and yourself, making your life outside of work richer and more fulfilling. Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies. Finally, you only have one life so spending most of your life in the office or commuting in and out of office is quite a waste of your time. You should use your free time to enjoy your life imho and experience more things.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      >You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them. Is that constant heads down, in the zone coding, or does that include some coding, some management, some marketing, etc? Also, how long can you do that for? 5 years straight? I typically work in bursts. If I don't have an outlet in between bursts (surfing, 30 minute tv show, walk, etc), the longer it takes to get back into a burst. Being in an office doesn't offer much as far as outlets go.
      - richardknop 9y ago
        It's the same for me, I work in bursts. Sometimes I will have 30m-1h of not very productive time (reading blog post on web, going for a walk etc) but then I will have a burst of productivity when I hunker down for couple of hours and do a lot of work. Obviously it isn't constant 8 hours of heads down, in the zone coding, there are things in between and also meetings and planning often takes time. I used to work longer before but as you say, that is not sustainable for a long run, you can do it for couple of years before you burn out. I also used to do quite a lot of extra work in the evenings and weekends when I had sudden inspiration / urge to refactor or improve some piece of code. But I don't do that anymore and instead use that free time for myself and my hobbies :) If I feel an urge to write some code on Sunday, I will work on one of my open source projects or contribute to some other projects out there if they interest me or I will experiment with new tech to keep my skills up to date.
devotedtoneu 9y ago
Because we need some voice out there standing for people and work life balance amongst a sea of slogans, media, advertising and group-think advocating sacrificing your life for the businesses' bottom line. Why would using your left-over time and effort for a side project that may improve your life a bad thing? Does your employer have the right to "own" that effort as well? If so I think the pay scales need some adjusting.
CSMastermind 9y ago
In my experience, the amount of workload you can handle is highly dependant on the person though everyone will see some diminishing returns after working a few hours straight. The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  > The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component. Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.
varjag 9y ago
The 8 hour work day was with physical labour in mind and makes much more sense in that context. Of course there are limits to office time productivity too and the stress factor of office jobs has considerable spread. That said I'd have 11 hours coding work over 8 hours of labour any day.
thegayngler 9y ago
I know many people who work lots of hours and the result isn't necessarily good. Those hard workers get lucky some of the time...but much of the time its all show and no substance. Pumping out all that poorly designed brittle code is not helping anyone. You can do a 70 hour week here and there but you can't sustain it long term without negative consequences. It's best to save your 70hr work week energy for when it's actually necessary than it being a regular thing. In fact even when looking at myself, many times I was "working" lots of hours but in reality I wasn't getting anything done. When I work 40 or less hours and take lots of breaks during the day I got way more done than when I had just been a seat warmer for 70+ hours per week. This is likely due to the fact that having rest periods and breaks allow my brains diffuse mode to also help solve problems. Many of my best ideas come when I'm lifting or playing basketball at the gym. You are not getting the best version of a person when they chose to work lots of hours and refuse to take time out for themselves. Our brains need plenty of rest in order to function optimally.
Twirrim 9y ago
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution. In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40 hour working week largely started out at the Ford Motor company back in the early 1900s, after Henry Ford experimented reducing hours and discovered that the number of mistakes made by workers went down drastically, and productivity increased. This swept across the industry because the improvements were impossible to deny. Slowly but surely that spread across other industries until it became the staple. 40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable. Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.
- dagw 9y ago
  It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    And if it's not been rigorously tested, then there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40. I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.
deleted 9y ago
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megous 9y ago
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong? You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  I don't think so. Everyone isn't the same, some people have more or less capacity to handle long hours. I personally feel that mastery and enjoyment have a large role in how many hours you can work. If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    I have no doubt that I could easily work more hours than I do now. But then I would have no time to do other things in my life. I have zero interest in handing the rest of my free time over to my employer, especially for free.
falcolas 9y ago
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. It's probably not, for thought workers at least. The correct value is probably lower - closer to 30 hours a week. There have been studies which have begun to correlate this, but I don't have them off hand. 40 hours is for manual, repetitive labor. And from my limited experience doing manual, repetitive labor when I was younger it's a pretty good number. I wasn't so exhausted I couldn't do anything at home after work, and I had the weekends to spend with friends and family. Working hard is a personal choice, but the chances are pretty good that the quality of work is going to drop as the hours pass.
PhoneRemote 9y ago
> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best. > For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong? You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic. Further, lots of bias going on here: * You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success * No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard. * Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree) > The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense? One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs. > Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4. Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.
Nursie 9y ago
It's not working hard though, it's working stupid. You get tired and become less effective. You make more mistakes and you end up going backwards. Now, people will vary in this, but as a general metric, if you try to get programmers to routinely put in long hours, you're on to a loser. Personal projects are different, and are not generally deadline-riven stress-fests.
autokad 9y ago
are you referring to the fact that the company in question is andrew ng's start up?
moron4hire 9y ago
There are many reasons why one can't believe a person's own reasoning for why they've succeeded where others haven't. There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press. People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week. It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare. There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.
mattmanser 9y ago
Argumentum ad populum and general disdain for academic research. What's the point of this comment? You might buy into the work long hours mythos of startups, but simply restating it doesn't make you any more right.
jnordwick 9y ago
> Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Isn't this standard fare for socialists and technocrats that HN is flooded with?
shados 9y ago
Yup. It's one of those case we want something to be true, but really, it isn't (always, anyway). Sure, some people are absurdly productive on 25 hours a week. Good for them! Keep at it! Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets. There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be. And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know. Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it). Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.
- blub 9y ago
  Your 60+ hours per week guy probably doesn't have much of a life outside software engineering. He'd be working between 8,5-12h/day, depending on how many workdays he puts in. At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship. They probably don't have time for friendships or even spending time with their family and socialising, which will take its psychological toll. Unless they magically find time to do some sports and take care not to sit in a chair all time, they're stressing their body a lot, which could lead to a weaker immune system and potentially musculo-skeletal problems. In conclusion, one can behave like a machine and work 60+ hour weeks, but they're literally trading away their life in order to achieve that. Get ready to search for a replacement or two for when/if they burn out.
otakucode 9y ago
It's the 'correct' amount of hours to maximize productivity for repetitive manufacturing labor tasks. Not mental work. We don't have any companies that have looked at the research into how capable humans are of extended periods of mental exertion and what it takes to optimize that.
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etyersgtresw 9y ago
"For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity." Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology? Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why? First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend. To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one. So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint. Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours. Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing). So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible. Finally, I want to point out two things: 1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%! 2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming. [x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.
fcbrooklyn 9y ago
Well said. I share your suspicions about 40 turning out to be the magic number. I also notice that these articles never seem to allow for differences between people, which flies in the face of my 25 years of experience. I've always felt most comfortable working seven days a week, at a manageable pace each day. Other people need those weekends, and are happy to put in long hours in the week. One of the most productive people I ever worked with seemed to work literally all the time. As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.
traverseda 9y ago
>it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. I mean, why do you think people arrived at the 40hour/week metric? How do you think we came to standardize on it?
- vkou 9y ago
  Union lobbying.
wonderwonder 9y ago
I don't know if 40 hours is optimal or not but it is the standard or yard stick by which salaries are set and measured. If company A offers me 100k and company B offers me 115k I can assume the rational choice is to accept company B's offer. This degenerates though if I discover company B requires 70 hours of work a week as there are costs to that including reduced family time, increased stress, less time to work on my own projects. etc. 40 hours is essentially a useful measuring stick and the accepted standard. Now I do agree that for some people they can and do work long hours and greatly enjoy this and good luck to them. I have to assume they are working at a company where they do work they love and are proud of. I think of employees at SpaceX, Tesla, video game companies for gamer type developers and NASA. I interviewed at a large game developer a long time ago and was asked back for a second interview. After I discovered they regularly worked past 7:30 at night I declined. I do not play video games so for me the draw was not there but I could absolutely understand how that could be someones passion and they love what they do. For me I value my family time and when comparing jobs prefer to compare apples to apples and the main way barring a very unique work place is to compare dollars earned per hour worked (including benefits). To your point though if someone wants to be there, they are making an informed choice and they believe it is an amazing opportunity then more power to them.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I absolutely believe it's exploitation to ask people to sacrifice their lives (which you're doing if you're working that long; you have no time for other things) and not pay significantly higher. "The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?" There's a huge difference between working on something for me, for which I have total ownership of, and working on something just to make someone else rich.
dv_dt 9y ago
Though Ford is noted as moving to 40 hours per week and gaining productivity in the factory, the 40 hours mostly came from political action from the labor movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.

by edanm 9y ago

richardknop 9y ago

If you are expecting me to work extra hours you will have to pay multiple of my normal rate for overtime. I'm sorry but anything else is some form of exploitation or at the very least unfair. And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of hours invested time in them. I choose to work on them for free because they interest me. If you want me to spend that extra time working on the company instead then don't expect me to do it for free. You are basically asking to own my free time which is ridiculous. Overtimes and their compensation should be clearly defined in the contract, otherwise you can't expect to take employees' free unpaid time outside of work hours.

Godel_unicode 9y ago
I think GPs point was that people can clearly be productive more than 40 hours a week because so many are. How people should be compensated for their time is only loosely coupled with how many hours they can work. I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.
- richardknop 9y ago
  You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them. However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week. So even if you can be productive for 70 hours per week, I wouldn't do it and instead invest that time in your family and yourself, making your life outside of work richer and more fulfilling. Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies. Finally, you only have one life so spending most of your life in the office or commuting in and out of office is quite a waste of your time. You should use your free time to enjoy your life imho and experience more things.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    >You might be right that some people can be productive more than 40 hours per week because I am one of them. Is that constant heads down, in the zone coding, or does that include some coding, some management, some marketing, etc? Also, how long can you do that for? 5 years straight? I typically work in bursts. If I don't have an outlet in between bursts (surfing, 30 minute tv show, walk, etc), the longer it takes to get back into a burst. Being in an office doesn't offer much as far as outlets go.
    - richardknop 9y ago
      It's the same for me, I work in bursts. Sometimes I will have 30m-1h of not very productive time (reading blog post on web, going for a walk etc) but then I will have a burst of productivity when I hunker down for couple of hours and do a lot of work. Obviously it isn't constant 8 hours of heads down, in the zone coding, there are things in between and also meetings and planning often takes time. I used to work longer before but as you say, that is not sustainable for a long run, you can do it for couple of years before you burn out. I also used to do quite a lot of extra work in the evenings and weekends when I had sudden inspiration / urge to refactor or improve some piece of code. But I don't do that anymore and instead use that free time for myself and my hobbies :) If I feel an urge to write some code on Sunday, I will work on one of my open source projects or contribute to some other projects out there if they interest me or I will experiment with new tech to keep my skills up to date.

devotedtoneu 9y ago

Because we need some voice out there standing for people and work life balance amongst a sea of slogans, media, advertising and group-think advocating sacrificing your life for the businesses' bottom line. Why would using your left-over time and effort for a side project that may improve your life a bad thing? Does your employer have the right to "own" that effort as well? If so I think the pay scales need some adjusting.

CSMastermind 9y ago

In my experience, the amount of workload you can handle is highly dependant on the person though everyone will see some diminishing returns after working a few hours straight. The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.

rsynnott 9y ago
> The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component. Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.

varjag 9y ago

The 8 hour work day was with physical labour in mind and makes much more sense in that context. Of course there are limits to office time productivity too and the stress factor of office jobs has considerable spread. That said I'd have 11 hours coding work over 8 hours of labour any day.

thegayngler 9y ago

I know many people who work lots of hours and the result isn't necessarily good. Those hard workers get lucky some of the time...but much of the time its all show and no substance. Pumping out all that poorly designed brittle code is not helping anyone. You can do a 70 hour week here and there but you can't sustain it long term without negative consequences. It's best to save your 70hr work week energy for when it's actually necessary than it being a regular thing. In fact even when looking at myself, many times I was "working" lots of hours but in reality I wasn't getting anything done. When I work 40 or less hours and take lots of breaks during the day I got way more done than when I had just been a seat warmer for 70+ hours per week. This is likely due to the fact that having rest periods and breaks allow my brains diffuse mode to also help solve problems. Many of my best ideas come when I'm lifting or playing basketball at the gym. You are not getting the best version of a person when they chose to work lots of hours and refuse to take time out for themselves. Our brains need plenty of rest in order to function optimally.

Twirrim 9y ago

> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution. In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40 hour working week largely started out at the Ford Motor company back in the early 1900s, after Henry Ford experimented reducing hours and discovered that the number of mistakes made by workers went down drastically, and productivity increased. This swept across the industry because the improvements were impossible to deny. Slowly but surely that spread across other industries until it became the staple. 40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable. Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.

dagw 9y ago
It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  And if it's not been rigorously tested, then there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40. I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.

deleted 9y ago

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megous 9y ago

> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong? You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.

Godel_unicode 9y ago
I don't think so. Everyone isn't the same, some people have more or less capacity to handle long hours. I personally feel that mastery and enjoyment have a large role in how many hours you can work. If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I have no doubt that I could easily work more hours than I do now. But then I would have no time to do other things in my life. I have zero interest in handing the rest of my free time over to my employer, especially for free.

falcolas 9y ago

> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. It's probably not, for thought workers at least. The correct value is probably lower - closer to 30 hours a week. There have been studies which have begun to correlate this, but I don't have them off hand. 40 hours is for manual, repetitive labor. And from my limited experience doing manual, repetitive labor when I was younger it's a pretty good number. I wasn't so exhausted I couldn't do anything at home after work, and I had the weekends to spend with friends and family. Working hard is a personal choice, but the chances are pretty good that the quality of work is going to drop as the hours pass.

PhoneRemote 9y ago

> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best. > For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong? You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic. Further, lots of bias going on here: * You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success * No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard. * Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree) > The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense? One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs. > Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4. Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.

Nursie 9y ago

It's not working hard though, it's working stupid. You get tired and become less effective. You make more mistakes and you end up going backwards. Now, people will vary in this, but as a general metric, if you try to get programmers to routinely put in long hours, you're on to a loser. Personal projects are different, and are not generally deadline-riven stress-fests.

autokad 9y ago

are you referring to the fact that the company in question is andrew ng's start up?

moron4hire 9y ago

There are many reasons why one can't believe a person's own reasoning for why they've succeeded where others haven't. There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press. People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week. It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare. There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.

mattmanser 9y ago

Argumentum ad populum and general disdain for academic research. What's the point of this comment? You might buy into the work long hours mythos of startups, but simply restating it doesn't make you any more right.

jnordwick 9y ago

> Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Isn't this standard fare for socialists and technocrats that HN is flooded with?

shados 9y ago

Yup. It's one of those case we want something to be true, but really, it isn't (always, anyway). Sure, some people are absurdly productive on 25 hours a week. Good for them! Keep at it! Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets. There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be. And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know. Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it). Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.

blub 9y ago
Your 60+ hours per week guy probably doesn't have much of a life outside software engineering. He'd be working between 8,5-12h/day, depending on how many workdays he puts in. At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship. They probably don't have time for friendships or even spending time with their family and socialising, which will take its psychological toll. Unless they magically find time to do some sports and take care not to sit in a chair all time, they're stressing their body a lot, which could lead to a weaker immune system and potentially musculo-skeletal problems. In conclusion, one can behave like a machine and work 60+ hour weeks, but they're literally trading away their life in order to achieve that. Get ready to search for a replacement or two for when/if they burn out.

otakucode 9y ago

It's the 'correct' amount of hours to maximize productivity for repetitive manufacturing labor tasks. Not mental work. We don't have any companies that have looked at the research into how capable humans are of extended periods of mental exertion and what it takes to optimize that.

deleted 9y ago

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etyersgtresw 9y ago

"For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity." Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology? Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why? First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend. To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one. So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint. Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours. Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing). So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible. Finally, I want to point out two things: 1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%! 2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming. [x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.

fcbrooklyn 9y ago

Well said. I share your suspicions about 40 turning out to be the magic number. I also notice that these articles never seem to allow for differences between people, which flies in the face of my 25 years of experience. I've always felt most comfortable working seven days a week, at a manageable pace each day. Other people need those weekends, and are happy to put in long hours in the week. One of the most productive people I ever worked with seemed to work literally all the time. As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.

traverseda 9y ago

>it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity. I mean, why do you think people arrived at the 40hour/week metric? How do you think we came to standardize on it?

vkou 9y ago
Union lobbying.

wonderwonder 9y ago

I don't know if 40 hours is optimal or not but it is the standard or yard stick by which salaries are set and measured. If company A offers me 100k and company B offers me 115k I can assume the rational choice is to accept company B's offer. This degenerates though if I discover company B requires 70 hours of work a week as there are costs to that including reduced family time, increased stress, less time to work on my own projects. etc. 40 hours is essentially a useful measuring stick and the accepted standard. Now I do agree that for some people they can and do work long hours and greatly enjoy this and good luck to them. I have to assume they are working at a company where they do work they love and are proud of. I think of employees at SpaceX, Tesla, video game companies for gamer type developers and NASA. I interviewed at a large game developer a long time ago and was asked back for a second interview. After I discovered they regularly worked past 7:30 at night I declined. I do not play video games so for me the draw was not there but I could absolutely understand how that could be someones passion and they love what they do. For me I value my family time and when comparing jobs prefer to compare apples to apples and the main way barring a very unique work place is to compare dollars earned per hour worked (including benefits). To your point though if someone wants to be there, they are making an informed choice and they believe it is an amazing opportunity then more power to them.

s73ver_ 9y ago

I absolutely believe it's exploitation to ask people to sacrifice their lives (which you're doing if you're working that long; you have no time for other things) and not pay significantly higher. "The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?" There's a huge difference between working on something for me, for which I have total ownership of, and working on something just to make someone else rich.

dv_dt 9y ago

Though Ford is noted as moving to 40 hours per week and gaining productivity in the factory, the 40 hours mostly came from political action from the labor movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.