11 ms·

A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

196 points by krigath 3y ago

jimsimmons 3y ago
Wrong link/title
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
spondyl 3y ago
I don't even know that The Economist wrote about this, as implied by the wrong link, but the source seems to be this: https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-betwee...
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  Thank you for the link, this one makes more sense.
sc0rpil 3y ago
[flagged]
- godelski 3y ago
  Catchy title and some of us read the slack link that's posted in the comments. But I guess also look at how many people posted the exact same response. Maybe they are right, people don't read.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  OP might have voting manipulation going on
- vintermann 3y ago
  Probably because if we were workaholics we wouldn't be on HN.
- wruza 3y ago
  Many of us rarely follows links.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  People only read the title.
- admissionsguy 3y ago
  Most people haven't noticed the link is wrong. On HN, one simply reads the title, assumes the content, and comments based on one’s prior beliefs.
- the_common_man 3y ago
  Shows you people only read titles . There is a reason clickbait works
jimsimmons 3y ago
I work in AI research in the Bay Area where hustle culture is strong. OpenAI and hot startups have normalised working long hours and taking few vacations. Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective. With such an aim it is easy to keep track of your progress over time and maximize your work. But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually. With such endeavors the goal is not well defined or measurable. Pressure to be productive or have demonstrable results often leads to myopic thinking, local minima, unsustainable designs, technical debt and spaghetti code. I haven't quite been able to capture why there exist these two modes. The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  > Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective Hustle is great if you are going to make 8 figures if the startup you work at ipos. Your roi doesn't really change at big companies. might even be negative in the cases where they freeze raises (msft and others).
  - admissionsguy 3y ago
    It's not inherently about salary but about perceiving the work as something important you really, really want to accomplish. Money is only one of the possible motivators.
    - Racing0461 3y ago
      I agree, its not really about salaries. Thats why people arent really motivated by the small promo structure or being rated TT/Exceeds Expectations at big companies. It's more about not being a wagie/generational wealth when the payoff happen that causes the change in behavior.
- fhd2 3y ago
  This is well understood in my peer group at least, and as a fractional CTO, I quite routinely find agreement with CEOs and the like on this as well. If you work hard, chances are you're not working smart enough. I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done consciously. Personally, I work with multiple companies and kinda found my holy grail in that: When I find myself doing questionable work in one place, I can always switch gears to something else and get back to it with some distance and fresh ideas. As an employee expected to work 40+ hours per week for a single company, that was a lot more difficult.
baz00 3y ago
This aligns with my findings over the years. The more over invested I am in something the quicker productivity grinds to a halt. Mostly because I enthusiastically cornered myself and end up creating more problems than I’m solving. Apathetic lazy me scoots on past workaholic me fairly easily on because it’s afraid of making itself busy later by accident.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
david-gpu 3y ago
The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted at the maximum rate allowed by our organization. My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion. My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job. Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.
- Helmut10001 3y ago
  Fully agree. On my last job interview, I sat in front of the committee (about 7 to-be colleagues) and the director. I said: > I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money. Everyone smiled. Except the director. I still got the position, but the director is still hoping I will at some time upgrade to 100%. I said I will consider again after 2 years, but I doubt my perception will have changed by that time.
  - gjulianm 3y ago
    To be honest, I don't know if I would have said that. I think that employees in "creative" positions (e.g., you're not serving customers at a bar and need to keep the shop open and working) are paid based on the output they produce. Whether that output is produced in 2, 6 or 8 hours is not really their problem. Looking at it this way, they would have happily paid you 100% of your salary for the same output you're now giving them with a 20% discount.
sideshowb 3y ago
How is productivity measured in their study though? As it's survey based I presume self reported? I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture? I could well believe they actually are less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.
pjc50 3y ago
This is a very good article. The core is that "productivity" is extremely hard to measure for most white-collar jobs, or indeed anything that isn't piecework or an assembly line. Even if you can assign a number to annual or monthly productivity (salespeople have monthly targets), you can't assign it to individual minutes of the day. So people end up producing the appearance of productivity instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.
mjirv 3y ago
> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive. It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better. At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours. Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.
- ben_w 3y ago
  To add to your example, UK school hours are (or were when I was going to them) 09:00-15:30. I'm not 100% sure the hours here in Germany (sadly lacking the need to know), but I think many are 08:00-13:30.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > make things easier for working parents. During the (now semi-aborted) back-to-office push at my employer, several of us pointed out that a 9-5 in the office is impossible for those of us with children and a commute. - 8:00am - earliest free drop-off time at school. - 8:12 or 8:20 - next bus or train to the city. I can probably make that from the school, if I fully sprint for at least half that journey. (Taking a car is riskier; traffic around the school or the station, or bad parking, means that driving is wildly more variable.) - 9:45 - earliest possible time I can roll into the office. - 5:00 - I slam my laptop shut, having already put on my coat, and sprint to the subway and/or bike share to head to the train station. - 5:16 - the earliest possible train I can make, assuming that all of Midtown stops for me. - 6:31 - the earliest possible arrival back home, 31 minutes past aftercare's closing time. The only way this would be doable is by hiring childcare for both mornings and afternoons, every day of the week, to the tune of ~$50 extra per day, minimum. That's on top of the cost of the commute.
  - JambalayaJim 3y ago
    In this case it just makes sense to have RTO at reduced hours. Make the standard work day something like 10-4. I never understood why people throw the baby out with the bathwater on things like this.
lijok 3y ago
Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company. 1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time. 2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into. 3. You're likely to become the "rockstar". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/developers/the-rockstar https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj.... 4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team. 5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or "hop on for a quick check". Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer. If you're finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.
- ipnon 3y ago
  In my experience having a “rockstar” or hero programmer on your team is the surest indication of a management failure, either in velocity, priority, or hiring.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  I disagree with some of this. I think if you work with international teams, half of the time of day stuff is in play no matter what. But in general I sort of agree that we should all try to work slower/work fewer hours, for the good of society. But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more, or those who might need more breaks or work most optimally at a slower pace. We should care about workers collectively and individually, I think.
dchftcs 3y ago
There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better. In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious. The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.
- Game_Ender 3y ago
  Part of the way I explain this is the amount of overhead in a company or position. Say you have 20 hours of coordination, planning and meetings/week, and 20 hours of direct work. If you work 50 hours you know increase how much development you are doing by 50% by only working 25% more hours. Now it the organization can do the same by cutting overhead and meetings but that is usually not up to one high performance contributor. Like you said the impact of a top contributor doing 50% more work can be really large, entire new systems can be built, key features launched. It can get you promoted, but you definitely won’t get a 50% raise.
ishtanbul 3y ago
Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?
- daniel-s 3y ago
  Learn Python, automate your work. Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work. Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word. Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use. If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers. Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.
  - zero-sharp 3y ago
    How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work? He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.
    - ishtanbul 3y ago
      Im looking forward to the msft copilot integration in office that can answer my emails and write transcripts of calls with to-dos. It will save time, but i think it will just up the ante since the culture is what got us here. And the risk of deals failing means you have to work on many at a time and accept as much as 100% swings in comp year to year. I would love to learn python, i figure with chatgpt i can learn it quickly. I learned vba with it and built bigger, crazier financial models but i still work the same amount… even my boss who is 50 is doing the same hrs. With ai is it even worth it to try to get started in software or robotics? I feel like i will not be able to get a job bc these systems are advancing so fast, they will take the jr jobs first. Value in my industry is really created from relationships (origination). The modeling and analysis work can probably be automated away with ai in a short time. I’m trying to bring the firm in that direction so that i can manage that.
robinhouston 3y ago
The reported results are more nuanced than the headline. Workers who feel pressured to work after hours estimate their own productivity as lower than workers who don't; but workers who choose to work after hours – rather than feeling pressured to do so – report slightly _higher_ productivity. It's tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.
jpm_sd 3y ago
My own experience completely agrees with the reported findings. But Slack is the #1 offender in terms of feeling "obligated to work after hours"
flappyeagle 3y ago
Yet another ink blot study where everyone will look at the results and see what they want to see. Work however long you want JFC.
- notfed 3y ago
  I agree. I think this comment would be highly upvoted if it included citations to contradictory studies, and maybe had a more constructive tone.
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    That’s good feedback thank you
kgjkgk 3y ago
[flagged]
kgjkgk 3y ago
[flagged]
conductr 3y ago
How much does “productivity” applications like Slack contribute to this problem?
renegade-otter 3y ago
The irony of Slack writing about productivity is not lost on me. "The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work": https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-slack-google-microsoft-facebook https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-sl...
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  This! If there’s any technology that has enabled and normalized after-hours work it’s got to be slack, perhaps even more so than email.
  - jondwillis 3y ago
    Pathetic behavior I have observed in myself in the past: unconsciously opening Slack at 8am/11pm after being let go from the job and not even being able to sign in.
    - renegade-otter 3y ago
      It has turned us into hamsters pushing the wheel. Open Slack, get a treat.
- jjav 3y ago
  Yes! I hate hate slack culture so so so much.
theodpHN 3y ago
1998 article with quotes from Jim Goodnight, CEO of analytics software company SAS: One big difference is that Goodnight and most of his staff work a 35-hour week. "We want people to go home and be with their families," he says. "This will make them more productive when they are at work. I would prefer that rather than have them non-productive for 12 months while they are getting over a divorce." https://www.afr.com/companies/fewer-rising-to-technologys-growing-challenge-says-data-warehouse-chief-19980518-kb41k https://www.afr.com/companies/fewer-rising-to-technologys-gr...
notfed 3y ago
Person reports working extra hours. Person also reports feeling behind schedule. I mean, is it really surprising these two are correlated? I'm pretty sure the causation works as follows: they're working extra hours because, like, they felt behind. Some people who aren't behind may work extra hours anyway...for fun? But I'm guessing that's less people. Not to mention there's cognitive bias at play: these people might not even self-report that as "working extra hours".
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
Do you know what is a great productivity boost? Muting all slack notifications.
Rhondalynn 3y ago
[dead]
1letterunixname 3y ago
Other points of reference: 0. Fire the workaholics by DHH / Signal v. Noise (2008) and Ch. 2 of Rework (2010) https://signalvnoise.com/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics https://signalvnoise.com/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics 1. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. - pg http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html

196 points by krigath 3y ago

jimsimmons 3y ago

Wrong link/title

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

spondyl 3y ago

I don't even know that The Economist wrote about this, as implied by the wrong link, but the source seems to be this: https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-betwee...

bornfreddy 3y ago
Thank you for the link, this one makes more sense.

sc0rpil 3y ago

[flagged]

godelski 3y ago
Catchy title and some of us read the slack link that's posted in the comments. But I guess also look at how many people posted the exact same response. Maybe they are right, people don't read.
gardenhedge 3y ago
OP might have voting manipulation going on
vintermann 3y ago
Probably because if we were workaholics we wouldn't be on HN.
wruza 3y ago
Many of us rarely follows links.
Racing0461 3y ago
People only read the title.
admissionsguy 3y ago
Most people haven't noticed the link is wrong. On HN, one simply reads the title, assumes the content, and comments based on one’s prior beliefs.
the_common_man 3y ago
Shows you people only read titles . There is a reason clickbait works

jimsimmons 3y ago

I work in AI research in the Bay Area where hustle culture is strong. OpenAI and hot startups have normalised working long hours and taking few vacations. Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective. With such an aim it is easy to keep track of your progress over time and maximize your work. But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually. With such endeavors the goal is not well defined or measurable. Pressure to be productive or have demonstrable results often leads to myopic thinking, local minima, unsustainable designs, technical debt and spaghetti code. I haven't quite been able to capture why there exist these two modes. The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.

Racing0461 3y ago
> Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective Hustle is great if you are going to make 8 figures if the startup you work at ipos. Your roi doesn't really change at big companies. might even be negative in the cases where they freeze raises (msft and others).
- admissionsguy 3y ago
  It's not inherently about salary but about perceiving the work as something important you really, really want to accomplish. Money is only one of the possible motivators.
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    I agree, its not really about salaries. Thats why people arent really motivated by the small promo structure or being rated TT/Exceeds Expectations at big companies. It's more about not being a wagie/generational wealth when the payoff happen that causes the change in behavior.
fhd2 3y ago
This is well understood in my peer group at least, and as a fractional CTO, I quite routinely find agreement with CEOs and the like on this as well. If you work hard, chances are you're not working smart enough. I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done consciously. Personally, I work with multiple companies and kinda found my holy grail in that: When I find myself doing questionable work in one place, I can always switch gears to something else and get back to it with some distance and fresh ideas. As an employee expected to work 40+ hours per week for a single company, that was a lot more difficult.

baz00 3y ago

This aligns with my findings over the years. The more over invested I am in something the quicker productivity grinds to a halt. Mostly because I enthusiastically cornered myself and end up creating more problems than I’m solving. Apathetic lazy me scoots on past workaholic me fairly easily on because it’s afraid of making itself busy later by accident.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

david-gpu 3y ago

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted at the maximum rate allowed by our organization. My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion. My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job. Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.

Helmut10001 3y ago
Fully agree. On my last job interview, I sat in front of the committee (about 7 to-be colleagues) and the director. I said: > I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money. Everyone smiled. Except the director. I still got the position, but the director is still hoping I will at some time upgrade to 100%. I said I will consider again after 2 years, but I doubt my perception will have changed by that time.
- gjulianm 3y ago
  To be honest, I don't know if I would have said that. I think that employees in "creative" positions (e.g., you're not serving customers at a bar and need to keep the shop open and working) are paid based on the output they produce. Whether that output is produced in 2, 6 or 8 hours is not really their problem. Looking at it this way, they would have happily paid you 100% of your salary for the same output you're now giving them with a 20% discount.

sideshowb 3y ago

How is productivity measured in their study though? As it's survey based I presume self reported? I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture? I could well believe they actually are less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.

pjc50 3y ago

This is a very good article. The core is that "productivity" is extremely hard to measure for most white-collar jobs, or indeed anything that isn't piecework or an assembly line. Even if you can assign a number to annual or monthly productivity (salespeople have monthly targets), you can't assign it to individual minutes of the day. So people end up producing the appearance of productivity instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.

mjirv 3y ago

> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive. It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better. At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours. Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.

ben_w 3y ago
To add to your example, UK school hours are (or were when I was going to them) 09:00-15:30. I'm not 100% sure the hours here in Germany (sadly lacking the need to know), but I think many are 08:00-13:30.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> make things easier for working parents. During the (now semi-aborted) back-to-office push at my employer, several of us pointed out that a 9-5 in the office is impossible for those of us with children and a commute. - 8:00am - earliest free drop-off time at school. - 8:12 or 8:20 - next bus or train to the city. I can probably make that from the school, if I fully sprint for at least half that journey. (Taking a car is riskier; traffic around the school or the station, or bad parking, means that driving is wildly more variable.) - 9:45 - earliest possible time I can roll into the office. - 5:00 - I slam my laptop shut, having already put on my coat, and sprint to the subway and/or bike share to head to the train station. - 5:16 - the earliest possible train I can make, assuming that all of Midtown stops for me. - 6:31 - the earliest possible arrival back home, 31 minutes past aftercare's closing time. The only way this would be doable is by hiring childcare for both mornings and afternoons, every day of the week, to the tune of ~$50 extra per day, minimum. That's on top of the cost of the commute.
- JambalayaJim 3y ago
  In this case it just makes sense to have RTO at reduced hours. Make the standard work day something like 10-4. I never understood why people throw the baby out with the bathwater on things like this.

lijok 3y ago

Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company. 1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time. 2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into. 3. You're likely to become the "rockstar". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/developers/the-rockstar https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj.... 4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team. 5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or "hop on for a quick check". Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer. If you're finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.

ipnon 3y ago
In my experience having a “rockstar” or hero programmer on your team is the surest indication of a management failure, either in velocity, priority, or hiring.
2devnull 3y ago
I disagree with some of this. I think if you work with international teams, half of the time of day stuff is in play no matter what. But in general I sort of agree that we should all try to work slower/work fewer hours, for the good of society. But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more, or those who might need more breaks or work most optimally at a slower pace. We should care about workers collectively and individually, I think.

dchftcs 3y ago

There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better. In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious. The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.

Game_Ender 3y ago
Part of the way I explain this is the amount of overhead in a company or position. Say you have 20 hours of coordination, planning and meetings/week, and 20 hours of direct work. If you work 50 hours you know increase how much development you are doing by 50% by only working 25% more hours. Now it the organization can do the same by cutting overhead and meetings but that is usually not up to one high performance contributor. Like you said the impact of a top contributor doing 50% more work can be really large, entire new systems can be built, key features launched. It can get you promoted, but you definitely won’t get a 50% raise.

ishtanbul 3y ago

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?

daniel-s 3y ago
Learn Python, automate your work. Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work. Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word. Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use. If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers. Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.
- zero-sharp 3y ago
  How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work? He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.
  - ishtanbul 3y ago
    Im looking forward to the msft copilot integration in office that can answer my emails and write transcripts of calls with to-dos. It will save time, but i think it will just up the ante since the culture is what got us here. And the risk of deals failing means you have to work on many at a time and accept as much as 100% swings in comp year to year. I would love to learn python, i figure with chatgpt i can learn it quickly. I learned vba with it and built bigger, crazier financial models but i still work the same amount… even my boss who is 50 is doing the same hrs. With ai is it even worth it to try to get started in software or robotics? I feel like i will not be able to get a job bc these systems are advancing so fast, they will take the jr jobs first. Value in my industry is really created from relationships (origination). The modeling and analysis work can probably be automated away with ai in a short time. I’m trying to bring the firm in that direction so that i can manage that.

robinhouston 3y ago

The reported results are more nuanced than the headline. Workers who feel pressured to work after hours estimate their own productivity as lower than workers who don't; but workers who choose to work after hours – rather than feeling pressured to do so – report slightly _higher_ productivity. It's tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.

jpm_sd 3y ago

My own experience completely agrees with the reported findings. But Slack is the #1 offender in terms of feeling "obligated to work after hours"

flappyeagle 3y ago

Yet another ink blot study where everyone will look at the results and see what they want to see. Work however long you want JFC.

notfed 3y ago
I agree. I think this comment would be highly upvoted if it included citations to contradictory studies, and maybe had a more constructive tone.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  That’s good feedback thank you

kgjkgk 3y ago

[flagged]

kgjkgk 3y ago

[flagged]

conductr 3y ago

How much does “productivity” applications like Slack contribute to this problem?

renegade-otter 3y ago

The irony of Slack writing about productivity is not lost on me. "The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work": https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-slack-google-microsoft-facebook https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-sl...

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
This! If there’s any technology that has enabled and normalized after-hours work it’s got to be slack, perhaps even more so than email.
- jondwillis 3y ago
  Pathetic behavior I have observed in myself in the past: unconsciously opening Slack at 8am/11pm after being let go from the job and not even being able to sign in.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    It has turned us into hamsters pushing the wheel. Open Slack, get a treat.
jjav 3y ago
Yes! I hate hate slack culture so so so much.

theodpHN 3y ago

1998 article with quotes from Jim Goodnight, CEO of analytics software company SAS: One big difference is that Goodnight and most of his staff work a 35-hour week. "We want people to go home and be with their families," he says. "This will make them more productive when they are at work. I would prefer that rather than have them non-productive for 12 months while they are getting over a divorce." https://www.afr.com/companies/fewer-rising-to-technologys-growing-challenge-says-data-warehouse-chief-19980518-kb41k https://www.afr.com/companies/fewer-rising-to-technologys-gr...

notfed 3y ago

Person reports working extra hours. Person also reports feeling behind schedule. I mean, is it really surprising these two are correlated? I'm pretty sure the causation works as follows: they're working extra hours because, like, they felt behind. Some people who aren't behind may work extra hours anyway...for fun? But I'm guessing that's less people. Not to mention there's cognitive bias at play: these people might not even self-report that as "working extra hours".

__turbobrew__ 3y ago

Do you know what is a great productivity boost? Muting all slack notifications.

Rhondalynn 3y ago

[dead]

1letterunixname 3y ago

Other points of reference: 0. Fire the workaholics by DHH / Signal v. Noise (2008) and Ch. 2 of Rework (2010) https://signalvnoise.com/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics https://signalvnoise.com/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics 1. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. - pg http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html