7 ms·

As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. I'd get com

As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. I'd get complaints that I was making people stop when they were in the middle of something, and I'd just say, you can carry on with it in the morning. It worked extremely well. Engineers just wanted to get on with their work as soon as they arrived in the morning. We'd have a 5 minute literal stand-up that really did only last 5 minutes because people were so impatient to get on with what they had put down the night before. The policy had to stop when a new VP was hired who valued presenteeism and the appearance of hard work over focus and energy.

irrational 4y ago
6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.
- gweinberg 4y ago
  Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    It’s still late in absolute terms. Not everything can just shift around to an abnormally late work schedule. This sort of schedule gives you virtually no free time with kids. Get home, eat, put kids to bed, wake up early because school doesn’t start at 10am, send them to school, wait a bit, leave for work. We are lucky that things are more flexible now. I don’t blame the manager. It was a different time. But it’s a schedule that doesn’t work well for a lot of people.
    - neura 4y ago
      I seriously think that the specific range of hours was not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree? If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am, so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote workers and the example of walking around the office? I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with respect to leaving them with something to start in the morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in the morning. Literally the point of the article there, leaving your work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced to not finish.
      - nonethewiser 4y ago
        I’m not not picking, I’m disagreeing with the idea that the relative end time is all that matters. I specifically did not blame the manager in my comment.
        augment001 4y ago
        It’s really not clear what you’re saying other than that 6pm would be too late for you personally. As I’ve explained - I picked that time as the latest people were allowed to work in the office. Before I adopted this, people were randomly staying much later.
    - augment001 4y ago
      It’s true that the team was made up of mostly young, unmarried men. I think only one senior person had children. I don’t recall what his needs were, but I wasn’t a hard-ass about not leaving early if people were productive. And certainly if the team in general hadn’t liked the hours, I’d have negotiated. We moved from 9am to 10am for that reason.
    - mock-possum 4y ago
      Your problem should not be how early or how late the schedule is - your problem should be that it’s arbitrary across all workers, regardless of circumstance. We all would prefer to work a particular schedule - we all deserve to be able to negotiate our hours based on necessary overlap with our coworkers preferences. “I wake up early so all of you have to wake up early” and “I work late so all of you have to work late” are both not nice.
  - augment001 4y ago
    Yeah - I couldn’t enforce a late start, 9am was too early to ask people to come in.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Well working 100 hours is still common in investment banking. But why focus on these subsets of jobs?
  - augment001 4y ago
    You are actually forced to do it if you choose to work for a place like that.
  - irrational 4y ago
    I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to go into the office, I'd typically show up just before 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with my work and output.
    - catiopatio 4y ago
      With an hour for lunch, that’s only 2.5-3.5 hours of work a day. Even less factoring in the stand-up. What role were you able to be successful at while only putting in 2.5hrs of work a day? Posted as an edit, since YC is doing its inexplicable rate-limiting on replies to this thread: > Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+ hours of work. … I typically start working when I step into the shower in the morning. … I think that all counts as work hours. I work from home, but I do not count my showers as working hours. That’s patently ludicrous, and frankly, 2.5-3.5 hours of “presence” a day is unbelievable. Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work, period. My work is in software verification, so it’s not as if I don’t need time to think, but I also put in the actual hours required every day to appreciably kick the can forward. I’d be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on) someone who considered their shower and commute as working hours.
- alana314 4y ago
  Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6 (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I guess I'm lucky! The most restrictive places I've worked set the hours at 8-5, so at least it didn't cut into precious evening time.
- nmat 4y ago
  This is big generalisation. In South Europe leaving at 6pm is early. Most of the people I know have standup after 10h30 and do 1h lunch breaks.
  - mike31fr 4y ago
    What do you call South Europe? I'm in Toulouse, here 6pm is late for some people, "normal" for others but nobody would say it's early here.
- adastra22 4y ago
  He's saying that's the latest. You can presumably leave earlier, but you can't stay later.
prometheus76 4y ago
William Carlos Williams would do the same thing with his writing. He wrote for exactly one hour every morning, and he would leave mid-sentence many times. He said it made it much easier to get started immediately the next day.
- yuuuuyu 4y ago
  Or it could be that you had a brilliant idea for the rest of the sentence, but the strict rule prevents you from writing it down, and next day you can't remember it and chase it all day and still be unsatisfied in the end. Either because of lost time or because you couldn't remember/recreate it, or even both. I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so that you don't have the somewhat hard task to start with sth new next day. But at the same time don't stop in the middle of sth that's difficult to pick up from. A strict timing rule does only help if you are statistically more often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach than a clock. I really like the parking downhill analogy.
  - augment001 4y ago
    > A strict timing rule does only help if you are statistically more often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach than a clock. Although I disagree with you when it comes to corporate policy, I basically agree with you at a deeper level. I think that being able to be completely asynchronous about how and when you work, while also being unafraid and deeply reflective about your process would be more of an ideal. However this isn’t realistic in a corporate situation, and in such a setting most people are more likely to be suffering from meaningless workaholism induced by relentless corporate pressure than they are to be operating at the highest levels of self-actualization.
    - pl90087 4y ago
      I like your attitude towards this. One should try to create a study to investigate the effects better. As alternative to "6pm you guys all go home, period.", there is likely a difference between "6pm you all go home, but if you really must finish sth, I'll wait until 6:30pm to pull the plug" and "go home whenever you want" (which may end up being 8pm or 10pm and in a game theoretic setting may lead to later and later time).
yuuuuyu 4y ago
That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.
- augment001 4y ago
  > Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes. But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
  - semireg 4y ago
    I pick the kids up from daycare at 4:30. Every few days its 4:25, I’m in the middle of something and I’ll spend 60 seconds writing out simple English sentences or bullet-points of what I need to accomplish when I get back to my desk. This context switch allows me to disengage. Sometimes I’m tempted to try “one more thing” a “Hail Mary” but it almost always backfires into a future wrong-approach distraction.
    - scruple 4y ago
      I'm the same way. I have a hard stop every day at 4:45pm to pick up my kids. I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 4:40pm and I spend the next few minutes taking notes if/when I need to. I might also try to package my current state into a commit if/when it makes sense but I don't tend to stress about it.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    > But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked. I agree, and relates closely to the YAGNI philosophy ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") [0]. It's easy to think, "I'm so close, it'll be easier just to do it now". But what's so special about now? Are you really that much smarter right now than you will be tomorrow (or next week, month, year..)? More knowledgable? More prepared? Possibly... but it's more likely to be the opposite: in the future, you'll understand the problem better, you'll have more data to choose the best path forward, you'll realize there's another way to do it, or you'll simply have bigger fish to fry. 0: https://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt https://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt
theshrike79 4y ago
I'm currently in a team that works pretty much 0800-1600, people mostly start logging off 15 minutes before four and after four everyone is either at home or packing their stuff. (Or playing a game if they're WFH :D ) There's zero pressure to work overtime and leaving on time is encouraged. If people work late, we encourage them to leave earlier and relax. Not all tasks can be solved with brute force head smashing.
The_Colonel 4y ago
> As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. Honestly, forcing people to any particular rhythm is a pretty bad idea unless things go out of hand. Sometimes I'm in the mood to continue on the problem, and sometimes I'm too tired and would rather leave by 4pm. Why shouldn't I be able to decide?
JonChesterfield 4y ago
I'd have quit over that. If the work is interesting and going well I'm not stopping because someone likes to exercise control over my schedule, I'll build something else instead.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  I do get what you’re saying on the one hand, I feel the same way, but - is your employer compensating you for working past 6pm, in this imaginary scenario? I started out doing a lot of hourly work earlier in my career, and sure, if I was on a roll I could jam for hours, and I was gettin paid accordingly. Lately, in salaried positions, I’ve basically had to break myself of that habit - that’s my free time I’m cutting into when I stay late. In emergency situations, I’m happy to stick around later if possible, with the understanding that there’s bonus compensation or at least comp time queued up for me - but if I’m just feeling engaged when 6pm rolls around? Im out, I’ve got dinner to cook and videogames to play. Work will wait for tomorrow, part of what I’m getting paid for in standard work week is developing on a schedule, you know?
taskforcegemini 3y ago
maybe worked extremely well for the company, but not for the worker. I would rather solve the issue before going home (thus having a clear mind at ease) than carry the burden of the looming unresolved issue till the next day.

irrational 4y ago

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

gweinberg 4y ago
Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  It’s still late in absolute terms. Not everything can just shift around to an abnormally late work schedule. This sort of schedule gives you virtually no free time with kids. Get home, eat, put kids to bed, wake up early because school doesn’t start at 10am, send them to school, wait a bit, leave for work. We are lucky that things are more flexible now. I don’t blame the manager. It was a different time. But it’s a schedule that doesn’t work well for a lot of people.
  - neura 4y ago
    I seriously think that the specific range of hours was not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree? If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am, so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote workers and the example of walking around the office? I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with respect to leaving them with something to start in the morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in the morning. Literally the point of the article there, leaving your work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced to not finish.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      I’m not not picking, I’m disagreeing with the idea that the relative end time is all that matters. I specifically did not blame the manager in my comment.
      - augment001 4y ago
        It’s really not clear what you’re saying other than that 6pm would be too late for you personally. As I’ve explained - I picked that time as the latest people were allowed to work in the office. Before I adopted this, people were randomly staying much later.
  - augment001 4y ago
    It’s true that the team was made up of mostly young, unmarried men. I think only one senior person had children. I don’t recall what his needs were, but I wasn’t a hard-ass about not leaving early if people were productive. And certainly if the team in general hadn’t liked the hours, I’d have negotiated. We moved from 9am to 10am for that reason.
  - mock-possum 4y ago
    Your problem should not be how early or how late the schedule is - your problem should be that it’s arbitrary across all workers, regardless of circumstance. We all would prefer to work a particular schedule - we all deserve to be able to negotiate our hours based on necessary overlap with our coworkers preferences. “I wake up early so all of you have to wake up early” and “I work late so all of you have to work late” are both not nice.
- augment001 4y ago
  Yeah - I couldn’t enforce a late start, 9am was too early to ask people to come in.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway1777 4y ago
Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Well working 100 hours is still common in investment banking. But why focus on these subsets of jobs?
- augment001 4y ago
  You are actually forced to do it if you choose to work for a place like that.
- irrational 4y ago
  I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to go into the office, I'd typically show up just before 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with my work and output.
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    With an hour for lunch, that’s only 2.5-3.5 hours of work a day. Even less factoring in the stand-up. What role were you able to be successful at while only putting in 2.5hrs of work a day? Posted as an edit, since YC is doing its inexplicable rate-limiting on replies to this thread: > Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+ hours of work. … I typically start working when I step into the shower in the morning. … I think that all counts as work hours. I work from home, but I do not count my showers as working hours. That’s patently ludicrous, and frankly, 2.5-3.5 hours of “presence” a day is unbelievable. Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work, period. My work is in software verification, so it’s not as if I don’t need time to think, but I also put in the actual hours required every day to appreciably kick the can forward. I’d be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on) someone who considered their shower and commute as working hours.
alana314 4y ago
Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6 (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I guess I'm lucky! The most restrictive places I've worked set the hours at 8-5, so at least it didn't cut into precious evening time.
nmat 4y ago
This is big generalisation. In South Europe leaving at 6pm is early. Most of the people I know have standup after 10h30 and do 1h lunch breaks.
- mike31fr 4y ago
  What do you call South Europe? I'm in Toulouse, here 6pm is late for some people, "normal" for others but nobody would say it's early here.
adastra22 4y ago
He's saying that's the latest. You can presumably leave earlier, but you can't stay later.

prometheus76 4y ago

William Carlos Williams would do the same thing with his writing. He wrote for exactly one hour every morning, and he would leave mid-sentence many times. He said it made it much easier to get started immediately the next day.

yuuuuyu 4y ago
Or it could be that you had a brilliant idea for the rest of the sentence, but the strict rule prevents you from writing it down, and next day you can't remember it and chase it all day and still be unsatisfied in the end. Either because of lost time or because you couldn't remember/recreate it, or even both. I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so that you don't have the somewhat hard task to start with sth new next day. But at the same time don't stop in the middle of sth that's difficult to pick up from. A strict timing rule does only help if you are statistically more often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach than a clock. I really like the parking downhill analogy.
- augment001 4y ago
  > A strict timing rule does only help if you are statistically more often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach than a clock. Although I disagree with you when it comes to corporate policy, I basically agree with you at a deeper level. I think that being able to be completely asynchronous about how and when you work, while also being unafraid and deeply reflective about your process would be more of an ideal. However this isn’t realistic in a corporate situation, and in such a setting most people are more likely to be suffering from meaningless workaholism induced by relentless corporate pressure than they are to be operating at the highest levels of self-actualization.
  - pl90087 4y ago
    I like your attitude towards this. One should try to create a study to investigate the effects better. As alternative to "6pm you guys all go home, period.", there is likely a difference between "6pm you all go home, but if you really must finish sth, I'll wait until 6:30pm to pull the plug" and "go home whenever you want" (which may end up being 8pm or 10pm and in a game theoretic setting may lead to later and later time).

yuuuuyu 4y ago

That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.

augment001 4y ago
> Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes. But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
- semireg 4y ago
  I pick the kids up from daycare at 4:30. Every few days its 4:25, I’m in the middle of something and I’ll spend 60 seconds writing out simple English sentences or bullet-points of what I need to accomplish when I get back to my desk. This context switch allows me to disengage. Sometimes I’m tempted to try “one more thing” a “Hail Mary” but it almost always backfires into a future wrong-approach distraction.
  - scruple 4y ago
    I'm the same way. I have a hard stop every day at 4:45pm to pick up my kids. I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 4:40pm and I spend the next few minutes taking notes if/when I need to. I might also try to package my current state into a commit if/when it makes sense but I don't tend to stress about it.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  > But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked. I agree, and relates closely to the YAGNI philosophy ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") [0]. It's easy to think, "I'm so close, it'll be easier just to do it now". But what's so special about now? Are you really that much smarter right now than you will be tomorrow (or next week, month, year..)? More knowledgable? More prepared? Possibly... but it's more likely to be the opposite: in the future, you'll understand the problem better, you'll have more data to choose the best path forward, you'll realize there's another way to do it, or you'll simply have bigger fish to fry. 0: https://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt https://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt

theshrike79 4y ago

I'm currently in a team that works pretty much 0800-1600, people mostly start logging off 15 minutes before four and after four everyone is either at home or packing their stuff. (Or playing a game if they're WFH :D ) There's zero pressure to work overtime and leaving on time is encouraged. If people work late, we encourage them to leave earlier and relax. Not all tasks can be solved with brute force head smashing.

The_Colonel 4y ago

> As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. Honestly, forcing people to any particular rhythm is a pretty bad idea unless things go out of hand. Sometimes I'm in the mood to continue on the problem, and sometimes I'm too tired and would rather leave by 4pm. Why shouldn't I be able to decide?

JonChesterfield 4y ago

I'd have quit over that. If the work is interesting and going well I'm not stopping because someone likes to exercise control over my schedule, I'll build something else instead.

mock-possum 4y ago
I do get what you’re saying on the one hand, I feel the same way, but - is your employer compensating you for working past 6pm, in this imaginary scenario? I started out doing a lot of hourly work earlier in my career, and sure, if I was on a roll I could jam for hours, and I was gettin paid accordingly. Lately, in salaried positions, I’ve basically had to break myself of that habit - that’s my free time I’m cutting into when I stay late. In emergency situations, I’m happy to stick around later if possible, with the understanding that there’s bonus compensation or at least comp time queued up for me - but if I’m just feeling engaged when 6pm rolls around? Im out, I’ve got dinner to cook and videogames to play. Work will wait for tomorrow, part of what I’m getting paid for in standard work week is developing on a schedule, you know?

taskforcegemini 3y ago

maybe worked extremely well for the company, but not for the worker. I would rather solve the issue before going home (thus having a clear mind at ease) than carry the burden of the looming unresolved issue till the next day.