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An employer that values you will empower you with commensurate compensation. If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they d

An employer that values you will empower you with commensurate compensation. If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they do then I would actively discourage them, and remove them from the team if they continued. Having someone like that around has several negative impacts; - It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. - It's harder to have discussions about the work being done when someone is working outside of office hours, which leads to things being done as one person sees fit, or needing to be reworked often. That annoys other people on the team. - Other people on the team who choose not to work more than their contracted hours would be very annoyed if they saw hours as a factor in compensation, leading to more staff churn. - In a small business that charges for time in days, someone working 16 hours a day is essentially giving the customer work for free. If you charge for 2 days work, and tell the client you're doing 2 days work, but only work 1 day, that's dancing around the edges of potential fraud. A client could very reasonably argue that if you did the work in 1 day they should only pay for 1 day... I would much rather have a good team of people working well together than have one hero doing most of the work.

10000truths 5y ago
> If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they do then I would actively discourage them, and remove them from the team if they continued. So you don’t value this behavior - you view it as a liability to your team, for the reasons you outlined. None of what you have stated contradicts my point.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
> - It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It shouldnt do though, your team should be able to work any number of hours and still be productive because things like illness, pregnancy, deaths, holidays occur and they are not always expected or planned. > - It's harder to have discussions about the work being done when someone is working outside of office hours, which leads to things being done as one person sees fit, or needing to be reworked often. That annoys other people on the team. Depends on the role the person is doing, a good team will be able to cater for those who do more hours, just view that person as like two people working then you can see your team is incapable of working with two people performing a task/job. > Other people on the team who choose not to work more than their contracted hours would be very annoyed if they saw hours as a factor in compensation, leading to more staff churn. Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter. >- In a small business that charges for time in days, someone working 16 hours a day is essentially giving the customer work for free. If you charge for 2 days work, and tell the client you're doing 2 days work, but only work 1 day, that's dancing around the edges of potential fraud. A client could very reasonably argue that if you did the work in 1 day they should only pay for 1 day... Then you have a contract issue which is not handling your charges properly. Flip this around, what if you got super busy and had to do 16hrs a day to complete the job more quickly to get onto another project/source of income, would you still work 8hrs because you contract charges are wrong? > I would much rather have a good team of people working well together than have one hero doing most of the work. I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter. I'll clarify then. Point 1 is that people get annoyed having to work with someone who puts in more time because it makes their work harder. Point 3 is that if people see that someone got a raise or a promotion because they put more hours in, then they will think they won't get a raise or a promotion unless they put more hours in. They will see working longer hours as the barrier to advancement, and if they don't want to do that they'll leave. I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves. Saying I "despise individualism" is a bit melodramatic. I've run teams for the last 20 years or so and I've enough experience to understand that a good, well-motivated team of devs who communicate well and collaborate on a common goal is far more effective in the long term than a team who have a lone dev who's happy to grind out code in the middle of the night.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    I see where you are coming from which is you want a team, which is understandable but that doesnt work for the individual whose happy grinding out code in the middle of night aka the lone wolves, but then would they be working in a team in the first place?
    - onion2k 5y ago
      would they be working in a team in the first place? If you're a dev who works alone, with no other devs, no product person, no QA, no support, and no users to collaborate with then you probably can just hack on your code for however long you want without bothering anyone.
watwut 5y ago
> It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It is more of resentment of lower quality of output and a lot wasted time while looking like super hard worker. People who work 80 hours a week dont have actually higher output. They get tired , myoptic and they get all their socialization in work. That means a lot of wasted time for everyone around while acted offended on suggestion that he/she is not the most performant person around. And yes, this was repeated observation.
- onion2k 5y ago
  That's certainly true of some devs, but I've also seen devs who don't have that problem. Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. That's why the points I outlined aren't about the individual dev. The impact on other people is still bad even if the dev is great. All of my reasoning about why I don't want 'heroes' come down to preferring a strong team of good devs over a good team behind a brilliant dev. Plus, if you want to make this about individualism and maybe stray into a little game theory, if a team has someone doing loads of more work than other people, one day that person is going to leave and your team will suddenly take a massive hit in productivity. That makes everyone on the team look bad. Everyone does better when there isn't an outlier (apart from the outlier, obvs).
  - watwut 5y ago
    > Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. Yes. What they can't is do it all night long and all day long for months on end. There are people whose hourly output is twice as múch as normal. I would even say that hourly output variation is much higher then "how many hours per week you are effective" in terms of output. And none of the "people angry because they have to test too much" ever happens.
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Yup, from experience, you can pull this off for maybe a week or two before you start causing problems or negative output, or get actual health issues. And that's if you're young, older people tend to fall off sooner. The clincher is that you're never getting paid for the extra effort commensurate to it.

10000truths 5y ago

> If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they do then I would actively discourage them, and remove them from the team if they continued. So you don’t value this behavior - you view it as a liability to your team, for the reasons you outlined. None of what you have stated contradicts my point.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

> - It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It shouldnt do though, your team should be able to work any number of hours and still be productive because things like illness, pregnancy, deaths, holidays occur and they are not always expected or planned. > - It's harder to have discussions about the work being done when someone is working outside of office hours, which leads to things being done as one person sees fit, or needing to be reworked often. That annoys other people on the team. Depends on the role the person is doing, a good team will be able to cater for those who do more hours, just view that person as like two people working then you can see your team is incapable of working with two people performing a task/job. > Other people on the team who choose not to work more than their contracted hours would be very annoyed if they saw hours as a factor in compensation, leading to more staff churn. Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter. >- In a small business that charges for time in days, someone working 16 hours a day is essentially giving the customer work for free. If you charge for 2 days work, and tell the client you're doing 2 days work, but only work 1 day, that's dancing around the edges of potential fraud. A client could very reasonably argue that if you did the work in 1 day they should only pay for 1 day... Then you have a contract issue which is not handling your charges properly. Flip this around, what if you got super busy and had to do 16hrs a day to complete the job more quickly to get onto another project/source of income, would you still work 8hrs because you contract charges are wrong? > I would much rather have a good team of people working well together than have one hero doing most of the work. I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves.

onion2k 5y ago
Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter. I'll clarify then. Point 1 is that people get annoyed having to work with someone who puts in more time because it makes their work harder. Point 3 is that if people see that someone got a raise or a promotion because they put more hours in, then they will think they won't get a raise or a promotion unless they put more hours in. They will see working longer hours as the barrier to advancement, and if they don't want to do that they'll leave. I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves. Saying I "despise individualism" is a bit melodramatic. I've run teams for the last 20 years or so and I've enough experience to understand that a good, well-motivated team of devs who communicate well and collaborate on a common goal is far more effective in the long term than a team who have a lone dev who's happy to grind out code in the middle of the night.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  I see where you are coming from which is you want a team, which is understandable but that doesnt work for the individual whose happy grinding out code in the middle of night aka the lone wolves, but then would they be working in a team in the first place?
  - onion2k 5y ago
    would they be working in a team in the first place? If you're a dev who works alone, with no other devs, no product person, no QA, no support, and no users to collaborate with then you probably can just hack on your code for however long you want without bothering anyone.

watwut 5y ago

> It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It is more of resentment of lower quality of output and a lot wasted time while looking like super hard worker. People who work 80 hours a week dont have actually higher output. They get tired , myoptic and they get all their socialization in work. That means a lot of wasted time for everyone around while acted offended on suggestion that he/she is not the most performant person around. And yes, this was repeated observation.

onion2k 5y ago
That's certainly true of some devs, but I've also seen devs who don't have that problem. Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. That's why the points I outlined aren't about the individual dev. The impact on other people is still bad even if the dev is great. All of my reasoning about why I don't want 'heroes' come down to preferring a strong team of good devs over a good team behind a brilliant dev. Plus, if you want to make this about individualism and maybe stray into a little game theory, if a team has someone doing loads of more work than other people, one day that person is going to leave and your team will suddenly take a massive hit in productivity. That makes everyone on the team look bad. Everyone does better when there isn't an outlier (apart from the outlier, obvs).
- watwut 5y ago
  > Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. Yes. What they can't is do it all night long and all day long for months on end. There are people whose hourly output is twice as múch as normal. I would even say that hourly output variation is much higher then "how many hours per week you are effective" in terms of output. And none of the "people angry because they have to test too much" ever happens.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Yup, from experience, you can pull this off for maybe a week or two before you start causing problems or negative output, or get actual health issues. And that's if you're young, older people tend to fall off sooner. The clincher is that you're never getting paid for the extra effort commensurate to it.