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The 40 hour part can be. It’s conveniently ignored by management and many workers have convinced themselves that it’s noble to do more than you’re paid for. Com
by bigmattystyles 6y ago
The 40 hour part can be. It’s conveniently ignored by management and many workers have convinced themselves that it’s noble to do more than you’re paid for. Combine that with peer pressure and you get what we have.
Personally, I’ve found that in the vast majority of cases, any more than 35-40 hours per week consistently yields diminishing returns, even with busy work.
I’ve been fortunate in my life with great management, where I’m on average 40 hours a week, and if I do pull a few 50-60 hours per week, there’s an unspoken agreement that I’ll do a couple 30 hour weeks. But you shouldn’t have to luck out with good management.
- sokoloff 6y agoI’m pretty convinced that if I could have my engineers work 4-5 times 4-5 hours blocks of deep, focused work per week - meaning work that is at the very limit of their cognitive and programming abilities, and do another 8-10 hours of the necessary corporate overhead, that we’d collectively get at least twice as much done per year. One difficulty is that a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit, but even with that set aside, it seems impossible to pivot to such a world with teams beyond a very small total company size.
- b3kart 6y ago> a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit Is this sort of work potentially automate-able?
- bigmattystyles 6y agoMost of them are not even worthy of automation. We waste time doing processes that are orthogonal or were shoehorned in because they worked for another team or division. But I get it, we somehow have to communicate with the remainder of an organization. I guess it’s the least bad of all the alternatives, especially if the system is open to change through reflection.