6 ms·

> Caution: The mentioned amount of hours is not advisable for people working on someone else's business for illusory stock options, with no payment for overtime

by ulkesh 9y ago

> Caution: The mentioned amount of hours is not advisable for people working on someone else's business for illusory stock options, with no payment for overtime. There's also no point in going beyond this number because working over 50 hours a week actually decreases productivity. Life should come first in the "work-life balance." Great disclaimer in the article. The only problem is that many employers will be quite happy with people working 50+ hours per week. It's up to the employee to not let an employer take that much advantage of them (this includes having enough savings to be able to put in notice at the job at any point, assuming no contract or law would prevent it). The current landscape of the technology field, while lucrative for an employee, especially in the United States, is tremendously skewed toward the business where many employers see high turn-around as the rule, and no longer the exception, leading the employer to expect employees to work such high numbers of hours. If a person likes working 200 hours per month, I wish them all the best and hope they are hourly-paid. Being salary-paid and having a family means I will continue to limit myself to 40 hours per week working for someone else. At a point where I work for myself, then, of course, that number may change.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. This is because the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies. If this was not the case, then the organization would need to employ additional staff to plan work, in order to maximise efficiency. Which would be waste. So if you're working for someone else, prioritize and cut what you don't have time for. You'll be surprised what you can cut.
- tehlike 9y ago
  "A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete." That's the whole problem, right there. Sometimes, this "well run" company will generate work that might not matter, not at all.
  - rockostrich 9y ago
    All companies that are well run will have a queue of work for each employee, but not all companies that have a queue of work for each employee are well run.
    - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      Not really. I'm currently working in a factory (Temporary job, but hey, it is the first one working in my non-native language, so it works out). For most employees, there is a set amount of work that can be done. The machines only go so fast, only need refilled so often, and so on. Gotta have enough truck drivers to comply with regulations. Mechanics sometimes have more work than they have allotted time for, but sometimes they sit around as well. Janitorial has enough time to clean - if they can't get their work done, it can be a safety hazard since we produce food products. Some employees surely have a queue of work or the company might have technically unnecessary work the employees can do during downtime if it goes on too long, but it doesn't necessarily filter to everyone.
      - chromaton 9y ago
        Sweep the floor, organize your tools, take out the trash. Make coffee. See somebody else working? Find out what they're doing and ask if you can help.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        That's already done. No need to organize tools since they are already that way simply by doing the job. Refilling things is part of the job and done in the natural course of things as folks shift positions and whatnot. Cleaning is similar. Trash? there isn't much need to change it unless full - otherwise, one is wasting trash bags and boxes. Where I am, that's once or twice a shift. Again, this is accounted for in the normal course of the job, just like breaks and lunches. Coffee is in the cafeteria or filled/cleaned on breaks and lunches. The machine makes a cup at a time so it isn't sitting around. It can't be in the production area anyway since it has the possibility of either messing up the machines or messing up the actual product (chocolate and candy) and ups the chance of making a customer sick. Yup, sometimes you see the mechanic working or someone fixing the machine. Untrained folks can't help. Sometimes the problem is in another section of the factory which you aren't trained on or even see. Can't exactly help that nor can you generally leave the production area without absolutely knowing you'll be down for some time. Then there are generally a few things to do, but since it requires moving staff, this is a last resort as it would negatively affect production. The place is obviously designed for nearly 100% production during all shifts that are scheduled (not always 24 hours), obviously allowing time for startup, shutdown, and cleaning. A well run factory doesn't have excess work for every employee every day. It will aim for as little downtime as possible and not having excess employees. Excess work, every day for every employee means some things just can't get done if you don't have downtime.
- wpietri 9y ago
  > A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. I'm not sure that's really true of a well-run company, but it's definitely true of badly run ones. In chaotic organizations, an unrealistic (or absent) sense of capacity and unclear priorities combine to create large amounts of work in process. Individual prioritization is definitely a survival skill there.
- randallsquared 9y ago
  > A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. In a high-level view, sure. But if the employee is given more to do than they could possibly do, it can be very damaging to morale. At review time of things one was expected to work on, there are things you accomplished, and things you failed to accomplish. In particular, if one responds to "I accomplished task1 and task2" with "Okay. What about task3, task4, ...?", that employee is being trained to believe they cannot succeed in this position. At that point, they are left with finding the fault either with this management style, or in themselves (...leading to imposter syndrome? I dunno, but maybe that's part of why that's so common in our sector).
  - kevan 9y ago
    The devil is always in the details. You need a unified approach from first-line managers up to directors setting big picture goals for it to work. There's about 20 things we'd like to do as an organization every year. But, to stay focused and execute well we need to choose the 3-5 most important things. The same applies at the individual level. If everyone's on the same page then it works great.
  - Joeri 9y ago
    There's a difference between "must do", "should do" and "can do". The list of "can do" should stretch years into the future, but the list of "must do" should always be shorter than available labor capacity.
- crpatino 9y ago
  > A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. That's utter MBA bullshit, based on 19th century pseudoscience (Taylorism). 1. Employee's incentives are never 100% aligned with company interests. That's an aspirational goal at best. This means that each employee will be under constant stress of doing what's best for the company vs doing what's best for his career. 2. A side effect for #1 is that it is even more untrue that employee's incentives are aligned among each other's. Even disregarding power struggles between individuals, it is often the case that job roles are adversarial in nature (think programmers vs testers dichotomy). This mean that even if an employee does a set of actions at the job that achieve +90% efficiency for his role, he may be pushing innefficiencies to other peers' roles (and should be doing so, according to game theory). 3. Independently of #1 and #2, efficiency comes at the cost of flexibility. Working conditions for today are not going to be necessarily the same tomorrow; and optimizing for today, every day, will put you in a position that forces you to change gears constantly, which is "inefficient" in the overall scheme of things. Personally, from my experience working a support role in HP, our manager strived for 80% resource utilization, - meaning we were strictly measured in our use of time, and if we were working more than 32 effective hours per week it was seen as a symptom of us either being undertrainned or our team being understaffed. You may think that paying someone to just hang around one day per week doing nothing was "inefficient". It was not, all of our coffee breaks, rest-room breaks, smalltalk with peers, etc, came out of that budget, for starters. It was always very strictly measured, even more so because I was a contractor and therefore payed overtime at 2 or 3 times my normal hourly rate, depending on the particular hours I put it. And I can hardly think of a time I worked with more intense focus in my career. And then, comes the issue of the emergency blackouts. One month before leaving that particular job, we had a catastrophic failure, where the recovery procedure itself failed and we had to jumpstart the mission critical system the long, hard way. It took 2 out of 7 people in my team to be devoted to that effort around the clock, and it would not have been humanly possible of the other 5 of us would not have had that 20% of slack to bear the blunt of the whole regular workload that was still expected from us during the time the brown-out lasted.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  Assuming the employee is working under some kind of team leader, wouldn't it be the job of said leader to filter out the less important tasks?
- II2II 9y ago
  > A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. That depends. It may do wonders for efficiency, yet there are a number of ways it can breakdown: failing to complete regulatory or contractual requirements is a big one, since they rarely allow for flexibility. Clients may not receive the service they expect, so the organisation's reputation will be damaged. In cases like that, prioritisation only really works to diminish the possibility that too much time is spent on small tasks or that efficiency is reduced by doing things out of order. It also turn small problems into a crisis. With staff already working at capacity, there are very few options for handling the problem.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    No, there should ALWAYS be more work. If there is not more work, then as soon as work runs out the team is idle. So you have to plan ahead.
    - milesvp 9y ago
      This seems like an assertion that may need to be challenged. I'm not convinced a team with no downtime is working at maximum output, let alone maximum efficiency. My experience is that teams that are constantly busy are rarely working on the most important thing, either for the short term or for the long term.
      - BatFastard 9y ago
        Isn't that poor planning? I never want a team "busy", I want everyone to see where we are going and why.
    - 33W 9y ago
      I think that there should always be more work, but there should not always be more critical work. This minimizes idleness while allowing non-critical tasks to be pushed aside when handling emergencies. For example, my team has a backlog of work to be done. There are certain things that cannot slip. There are plenty of things that could be pushed out to handle a production outage, or a shiny object, etc.
- whiddershins 9y ago
  This comment is an oversimplification. There are many situations where the marginal cost per employee is negligible, but the cost to missing deadlines or failing to complete every item is significant.
- rangersanger 9y ago
  Interesting statement. From my perspective this has been true of well run and poorly run companies alike. Perhaps part of the difference is that well run companies allow the employees to prioritize, and poorly run companies don't. Either due to lack of trust or lack of clear/aligned company goals. Additionally, poorly run companies/departments, and their employees may not realize this tacit agreement exists, leading to employee burnout, poor outcomes, etc. Personally I've always known there would be more work than can be done, and part of my job is to "manage up," expectations. However, I've known many many colleagues over the years who have not been able to prioritize work in the same way. Wondering if more openness around this concept would lead to better outcomes.
- tentaTherapist 9y ago
  > the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies. Why would their incentives align at all?
- tigershark 9y ago
  Ok, either you never worked for a big company or all the places where I worked were not well run accordingly to your definition. I guess it is a mixture of both options.
- findoer 9y ago
  When I started out, I thought you would be assigned work with the expectation that you could complete it. I basically murdered myself for a half a year and developed minor health problems, since I was broke and worried about losing my income. As my energy and stuff deteriorated I lost the ability to concentrate or do much work, and I started getting warnings for not working fast enough etc. At that point I felt manipulated and got angry, and thought that actual work output counted for nothing, since it just lead to raised expectations, accusations of not working hard enough, and no upside. So I spent half a year doing the minimum amount of actual work I thought I could get away while spending the rest of my time socializing and helping out coworkers. I think this basically made my manager lose her mind. She started badmouthing me to my skip level and using me as a scape goat for our project not working out (we were a small team and I went from the highest output worker to the slowest) but all my skip level manager would hear from other employees was how great an employee I was. Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization. Overall, I think that this only works if everyone is straight forward and doesn't do any creepy things out of greed or ambition.
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    > Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization. I often think that people say that someone is "psycho" when the person is actually just someone stupid who ended up with some power, perhaps through physical attractiveness, or through simple dishonesty, or maybe even both. Was that woman less intelligent than you? Was she not very intelligent to begin with? I think it's actually more helpful and more accurate for people to replace a psychoanalytic view of others, with a straightfoward smart-or-stupid view, and of course that is to be done in context. It's important not to overthink things. A professional chef may think I'm "crazy" for how inefficiently and poorly I cook my food every day, but actually I'm just stupid at it.
    - findoer 9y ago
      No, she was pretty smart and sort of obese. She got in shape during the time period and was normal weight by the time she quit.
flyinglizard 9y ago
I'm thankful for working at a position where I enjoy putting in hours above and beyond what's required by contract. I'd advise anyone to prioritize having a work they thoroughly enjoy well ahead of a work that requires less hours. When you enjoy something, it makes sense to want to be doing that something for a prolonged duration.
- wolco 9y ago
  It sounds like you feel a sense of ownership around the work you do. That is great but I hope you understand that you do not own the code. You are a contractor and have no stake in the future success of the project. All of the extra free hours you are spending could be used to build your own product that you would have a stake in.
  - flyinglizard 9y ago
    I've built my own product, now building someone else's product at a scale that was inaccessible to me in my previous adventures. I've had lots of back and forth with myself on that as it's the first time I hold a corporate position in 10 years and I found the idea of working for someone else very unlike myself. Eventually I understood I just like building stuff, the monetary compensation is just a bonus. If you let me build big enough stuff and pay me enough so that money is inconsequential, I'll be happy, at least temporarily; the end game is taking a startup "all the way", but what I'm doing now is an indispensable lesson in large scale stuff.
    - Noumenon72 9y ago
      The scale thing is one way of seeing you've found a place where you can be much more than you could be by yourself. I've put my exact same work ethic into other jobs and projects and gotten nowhere; in the current case where what I can provide is actually just what they need, I want to work as many hours as I can while the opportunity lasts. It's just wasteful not to.
- ryanschneider 9y ago
  > I'd advise anyone to prioritize having a work they thoroughly enjoy well ahead of a work that requires less hours. Thanks, that's really insightful. I've been trying to minimize my work hours lately, but am starting to realize it might be that I'm not enjoying the job as much as I should be. Seems like the ideal job would be one that you _could_ get done in minimal hours but _don't want to_. If you find yourself in that situation, you have a lot of control of your work/life balance. At that point whether you are doing it for yourself or an employer doesn't matter as much, though it's pretty hard to find companies that measure employees on output rather than input. Or rather, ones that understand that more input _from a given developer_ won't necessarily deliver more, or at least higher quality, output.
FigmentEngine 9y ago
the big problem is the lax use of the word 'productive' creativity requires headspace. this article has some ideas that help. but fundamentally productive .neq. hours. Yes to achieve things you need to work hard, but its got to be smart. headspaces, streams, blocks, downtime, outcomes. time-away-from-keyboard, physical movement, purpose. these turn your 20 hours into 2000 hours of impact. measure outcome metrics not input metrics like hours
shoover 9y ago
I second the disclaimer. The hourly path for money is fine, or also consider a hard focused normal work week followed by the same level of focus on complementary tasks on the weekend or evenings, such as a side project, open source contributions, or further studies. The same habits around environment, body, and mind carry over to benefit both projects and only the exact artifacts of the effort need change. As Csikszentmihalyi points out in Flow, many of make ourselves miserable by having no focus whatsoever in our leisure time.

by ulkesh 9y ago

albertgoeswoof 9y ago

A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. This is because the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies. If this was not the case, then the organization would need to employ additional staff to plan work, in order to maximise efficiency. Which would be waste. So if you're working for someone else, prioritize and cut what you don't have time for. You'll be surprised what you can cut.

tehlike 9y ago
"A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete." That's the whole problem, right there. Sometimes, this "well run" company will generate work that might not matter, not at all.
- rockostrich 9y ago
  All companies that are well run will have a queue of work for each employee, but not all companies that have a queue of work for each employee are well run.
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    Not really. I'm currently working in a factory (Temporary job, but hey, it is the first one working in my non-native language, so it works out). For most employees, there is a set amount of work that can be done. The machines only go so fast, only need refilled so often, and so on. Gotta have enough truck drivers to comply with regulations. Mechanics sometimes have more work than they have allotted time for, but sometimes they sit around as well. Janitorial has enough time to clean - if they can't get their work done, it can be a safety hazard since we produce food products. Some employees surely have a queue of work or the company might have technically unnecessary work the employees can do during downtime if it goes on too long, but it doesn't necessarily filter to everyone.
    - chromaton 9y ago
      Sweep the floor, organize your tools, take out the trash. Make coffee. See somebody else working? Find out what they're doing and ask if you can help.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        That's already done. No need to organize tools since they are already that way simply by doing the job. Refilling things is part of the job and done in the natural course of things as folks shift positions and whatnot. Cleaning is similar. Trash? there isn't much need to change it unless full - otherwise, one is wasting trash bags and boxes. Where I am, that's once or twice a shift. Again, this is accounted for in the normal course of the job, just like breaks and lunches. Coffee is in the cafeteria or filled/cleaned on breaks and lunches. The machine makes a cup at a time so it isn't sitting around. It can't be in the production area anyway since it has the possibility of either messing up the machines or messing up the actual product (chocolate and candy) and ups the chance of making a customer sick. Yup, sometimes you see the mechanic working or someone fixing the machine. Untrained folks can't help. Sometimes the problem is in another section of the factory which you aren't trained on or even see. Can't exactly help that nor can you generally leave the production area without absolutely knowing you'll be down for some time. Then there are generally a few things to do, but since it requires moving staff, this is a last resort as it would negatively affect production. The place is obviously designed for nearly 100% production during all shifts that are scheduled (not always 24 hours), obviously allowing time for startup, shutdown, and cleaning. A well run factory doesn't have excess work for every employee every day. It will aim for as little downtime as possible and not having excess employees. Excess work, every day for every employee means some things just can't get done if you don't have downtime.
wpietri 9y ago
> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. I'm not sure that's really true of a well-run company, but it's definitely true of badly run ones. In chaotic organizations, an unrealistic (or absent) sense of capacity and unclear priorities combine to create large amounts of work in process. Individual prioritization is definitely a survival skill there.
randallsquared 9y ago
> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. In a high-level view, sure. But if the employee is given more to do than they could possibly do, it can be very damaging to morale. At review time of things one was expected to work on, there are things you accomplished, and things you failed to accomplish. In particular, if one responds to "I accomplished task1 and task2" with "Okay. What about task3, task4, ...?", that employee is being trained to believe they cannot succeed in this position. At that point, they are left with finding the fault either with this management style, or in themselves (...leading to imposter syndrome? I dunno, but maybe that's part of why that's so common in our sector).
- kevan 9y ago
  The devil is always in the details. You need a unified approach from first-line managers up to directors setting big picture goals for it to work. There's about 20 things we'd like to do as an organization every year. But, to stay focused and execute well we need to choose the 3-5 most important things. The same applies at the individual level. If everyone's on the same page then it works great.
- Joeri 9y ago
  There's a difference between "must do", "should do" and "can do". The list of "can do" should stretch years into the future, but the list of "must do" should always be shorter than available labor capacity.
crpatino 9y ago
> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. That's utter MBA bullshit, based on 19th century pseudoscience (Taylorism). 1. Employee's incentives are never 100% aligned with company interests. That's an aspirational goal at best. This means that each employee will be under constant stress of doing what's best for the company vs doing what's best for his career. 2. A side effect for #1 is that it is even more untrue that employee's incentives are aligned among each other's. Even disregarding power struggles between individuals, it is often the case that job roles are adversarial in nature (think programmers vs testers dichotomy). This mean that even if an employee does a set of actions at the job that achieve +90% efficiency for his role, he may be pushing innefficiencies to other peers' roles (and should be doing so, according to game theory). 3. Independently of #1 and #2, efficiency comes at the cost of flexibility. Working conditions for today are not going to be necessarily the same tomorrow; and optimizing for today, every day, will put you in a position that forces you to change gears constantly, which is "inefficient" in the overall scheme of things. Personally, from my experience working a support role in HP, our manager strived for 80% resource utilization, - meaning we were strictly measured in our use of time, and if we were working more than 32 effective hours per week it was seen as a symptom of us either being undertrainned or our team being understaffed. You may think that paying someone to just hang around one day per week doing nothing was "inefficient". It was not, all of our coffee breaks, rest-room breaks, smalltalk with peers, etc, came out of that budget, for starters. It was always very strictly measured, even more so because I was a contractor and therefore payed overtime at 2 or 3 times my normal hourly rate, depending on the particular hours I put it. And I can hardly think of a time I worked with more intense focus in my career. And then, comes the issue of the emergency blackouts. One month before leaving that particular job, we had a catastrophic failure, where the recovery procedure itself failed and we had to jumpstart the mission critical system the long, hard way. It took 2 out of 7 people in my team to be devoted to that effort around the clock, and it would not have been humanly possible of the other 5 of us would not have had that 20% of slack to bear the blunt of the whole regular workload that was still expected from us during the time the brown-out lasted.
Cyph0n 9y ago
Assuming the employee is working under some kind of team leader, wouldn't it be the job of said leader to filter out the less important tasks?
II2II 9y ago
> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete. That depends. It may do wonders for efficiency, yet there are a number of ways it can breakdown: failing to complete regulatory or contractual requirements is a big one, since they rarely allow for flexibility. Clients may not receive the service they expect, so the organisation's reputation will be damaged. In cases like that, prioritisation only really works to diminish the possibility that too much time is spent on small tasks or that efficiency is reduced by doing things out of order. It also turn small problems into a crisis. With staff already working at capacity, there are very few options for handling the problem.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  No, there should ALWAYS be more work. If there is not more work, then as soon as work runs out the team is idle. So you have to plan ahead.
  - milesvp 9y ago
    This seems like an assertion that may need to be challenged. I'm not convinced a team with no downtime is working at maximum output, let alone maximum efficiency. My experience is that teams that are constantly busy are rarely working on the most important thing, either for the short term or for the long term.
    - BatFastard 9y ago
      Isn't that poor planning? I never want a team "busy", I want everyone to see where we are going and why.
  - 33W 9y ago
    I think that there should always be more work, but there should not always be more critical work. This minimizes idleness while allowing non-critical tasks to be pushed aside when handling emergencies. For example, my team has a backlog of work to be done. There are certain things that cannot slip. There are plenty of things that could be pushed out to handle a production outage, or a shiny object, etc.
whiddershins 9y ago
This comment is an oversimplification. There are many situations where the marginal cost per employee is negligible, but the cost to missing deadlines or failing to complete every item is significant.
rangersanger 9y ago
Interesting statement. From my perspective this has been true of well run and poorly run companies alike. Perhaps part of the difference is that well run companies allow the employees to prioritize, and poorly run companies don't. Either due to lack of trust or lack of clear/aligned company goals. Additionally, poorly run companies/departments, and their employees may not realize this tacit agreement exists, leading to employee burnout, poor outcomes, etc. Personally I've always known there would be more work than can be done, and part of my job is to "manage up," expectations. However, I've known many many colleagues over the years who have not been able to prioritize work in the same way. Wondering if more openness around this concept would lead to better outcomes.
tentaTherapist 9y ago
> the employee is then forced to prioritise their work themselves and only focus on the pieces of work that align with their incentives. Which should align with the company incentivies. Why would their incentives align at all?
tigershark 9y ago
Ok, either you never worked for a big company or all the places where I worked were not well run accordingly to your definition. I guess it is a mixture of both options.
findoer 9y ago
When I started out, I thought you would be assigned work with the expectation that you could complete it. I basically murdered myself for a half a year and developed minor health problems, since I was broke and worried about losing my income. As my energy and stuff deteriorated I lost the ability to concentrate or do much work, and I started getting warnings for not working fast enough etc. At that point I felt manipulated and got angry, and thought that actual work output counted for nothing, since it just lead to raised expectations, accusations of not working hard enough, and no upside. So I spent half a year doing the minimum amount of actual work I thought I could get away while spending the rest of my time socializing and helping out coworkers. I think this basically made my manager lose her mind. She started badmouthing me to my skip level and using me as a scape goat for our project not working out (we were a small team and I went from the highest output worker to the slowest) but all my skip level manager would hear from other employees was how great an employee I was. Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization. Overall, I think that this only works if everyone is straight forward and doesn't do any creepy things out of greed or ambition.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  > Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization. I often think that people say that someone is "psycho" when the person is actually just someone stupid who ended up with some power, perhaps through physical attractiveness, or through simple dishonesty, or maybe even both. Was that woman less intelligent than you? Was she not very intelligent to begin with? I think it's actually more helpful and more accurate for people to replace a psychoanalytic view of others, with a straightfoward smart-or-stupid view, and of course that is to be done in context. It's important not to overthink things. A professional chef may think I'm "crazy" for how inefficiently and poorly I cook my food every day, but actually I'm just stupid at it.
  - findoer 9y ago
    No, she was pretty smart and sort of obese. She got in shape during the time period and was normal weight by the time she quit.

flyinglizard 9y ago

I'm thankful for working at a position where I enjoy putting in hours above and beyond what's required by contract. I'd advise anyone to prioritize having a work they thoroughly enjoy well ahead of a work that requires less hours. When you enjoy something, it makes sense to want to be doing that something for a prolonged duration.

wolco 9y ago
It sounds like you feel a sense of ownership around the work you do. That is great but I hope you understand that you do not own the code. You are a contractor and have no stake in the future success of the project. All of the extra free hours you are spending could be used to build your own product that you would have a stake in.
- flyinglizard 9y ago
  I've built my own product, now building someone else's product at a scale that was inaccessible to me in my previous adventures. I've had lots of back and forth with myself on that as it's the first time I hold a corporate position in 10 years and I found the idea of working for someone else very unlike myself. Eventually I understood I just like building stuff, the monetary compensation is just a bonus. If you let me build big enough stuff and pay me enough so that money is inconsequential, I'll be happy, at least temporarily; the end game is taking a startup "all the way", but what I'm doing now is an indispensable lesson in large scale stuff.
  - Noumenon72 9y ago
    The scale thing is one way of seeing you've found a place where you can be much more than you could be by yourself. I've put my exact same work ethic into other jobs and projects and gotten nowhere; in the current case where what I can provide is actually just what they need, I want to work as many hours as I can while the opportunity lasts. It's just wasteful not to.
ryanschneider 9y ago
> I'd advise anyone to prioritize having a work they thoroughly enjoy well ahead of a work that requires less hours. Thanks, that's really insightful. I've been trying to minimize my work hours lately, but am starting to realize it might be that I'm not enjoying the job as much as I should be. Seems like the ideal job would be one that you _could_ get done in minimal hours but _don't want to_. If you find yourself in that situation, you have a lot of control of your work/life balance. At that point whether you are doing it for yourself or an employer doesn't matter as much, though it's pretty hard to find companies that measure employees on output rather than input. Or rather, ones that understand that more input _from a given developer_ won't necessarily deliver more, or at least higher quality, output.

FigmentEngine 9y ago

the big problem is the lax use of the word 'productive' creativity requires headspace. this article has some ideas that help. but fundamentally productive .neq. hours. Yes to achieve things you need to work hard, but its got to be smart. headspaces, streams, blocks, downtime, outcomes. time-away-from-keyboard, physical movement, purpose. these turn your 20 hours into 2000 hours of impact. measure outcome metrics not input metrics like hours

shoover 9y ago

I second the disclaimer. The hourly path for money is fine, or also consider a hard focused normal work week followed by the same level of focus on complementary tasks on the weekend or evenings, such as a side project, open source contributions, or further studies. The same habits around environment, body, and mind carry over to benefit both projects and only the exact artifacts of the effort need change. As Csikszentmihalyi points out in Flow, many of make ourselves miserable by having no focus whatsoever in our leisure time.