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>My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day. Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour ba

>My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day. Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.

Gibbon1 6y ago
My favorite is trying to figure out a bug and nothing I can think of provides any clue. So I do some other work for a bit and go home. And the next morning sit down down and fix the problem in 2 minutes. Obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning. But how would you bill for THAT. Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that? I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Last year we had a management meeting and somehow started talking about smoking. Someone suggested we should ban people from smoking because they are wasting company's time.I defended the smokers arguing these are usually much needed breaks for those on the phones. Then I went on explaining that I could literally sit outside the office all day and just talk to my colleague and smoke one after another and It will be a productive day for us.They were taken back for a bit by such arguments,but then I explained that we get paid for using our brains and if it takes 5 hours to sit outside and think how to do it and then jump back on the keyboard and write code in 2 hours that implements this idea,then that's what it is. Everyone agreed and we moved on from the topic:)
  - jedberg 6y ago
    When I was a junior engineer, I worked on a team where everyone but me smoked. They would smoke for five minutes of every hour. It really pissed me off that they got breaks and I didn't. So I started joining them. Not to smoke, just to hang out while they smoked. And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  >”obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning” https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem. The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
kyuudou 6y ago
>we need to make this 8 hour bar die. I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this. I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late. On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  > I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work... We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    >eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work. Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.

Gibbon1 6y ago

My favorite is trying to figure out a bug and nothing I can think of provides any clue. So I do some other work for a bit and go home. And the next morning sit down down and fix the problem in 2 minutes. Obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning. But how would you bill for THAT. Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that? I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.

cosmodisk 6y ago
Last year we had a management meeting and somehow started talking about smoking. Someone suggested we should ban people from smoking because they are wasting company's time.I defended the smokers arguing these are usually much needed breaks for those on the phones. Then I went on explaining that I could literally sit outside the office all day and just talk to my colleague and smoke one after another and It will be a productive day for us.They were taken back for a bit by such arguments,but then I explained that we get paid for using our brains and if it takes 5 hours to sit outside and think how to do it and then jump back on the keyboard and write code in 2 hours that implements this idea,then that's what it is. Everyone agreed and we moved on from the topic:)
- jedberg 6y ago
  When I was a junior engineer, I worked on a team where everyone but me smoked. They would smoke for five minutes of every hour. It really pissed me off that they got breaks and I didn't. So I started joining them. Not to smoke, just to hang out while they smoked. And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
dvtrn 6y ago
>”obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning” https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem. The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.

kyuudou 6y ago

>we need to make this 8 hour bar die. I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this. I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late. On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.

poulsbohemian 6y ago
> I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work... We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  >eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work. Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.