13 ms·

The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

328 points by tchalla 3y ago

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
Wow, slaves perform worse when tired! What a discovery... Fck any employer with required "off hours" and wage formulas for compensation. Actually ... fck off hours.
simplypeter 3y ago
There is no way that climbing the stairs to the 10th floor will be as fast as climbing to the 1st or 8th floor, let alone the 10th floor. The same applies to working hours. There's no way you'll be as productive in the 10th hour as you were in your first hour.
- fleischhauf 3y ago
  I don't fully get the analogy. 10th floor is higher than 1st or 8th, so then you would get more work done? You can certainly climb 10 floors with the same speed as 1 or 8..
  - nikau 3y ago
    Replace 10 with the highest floor your muscles can go to before they are exhausted
- FredPret 3y ago
  Brains aren’t like quadriceps. I get more productive as I work longer and build momentum. More and more concepts are loaded in memory, so to speak. To me, it’s more like speeding up until I hit the wall on the tenth floor.
  - balderdash 3y ago
    I’m of two minds on this a. It depends if we are building or thinking - building definitely benefits from more time, and feel like I get momentum (as you described), implementing something over 12+hr sprint is hugely productive for me. On the other hand if I have a problem to solve I’m completely unproductive trying to do it at 3am.
  - LesZedCB 3y ago
    sure but cache warming works on the order of 30 minutes
PedroBatista 3y ago
Surprising huh? If the wording and subjects presented in the "article" sound a bit like Bill Lumbergh with a polo shirt was the author, don't forget Slack is Salesforce now.
kortilla 3y ago
How do they control for the fact that people who are falling behind frequently work more after hours? Is it that after hours works causes loss of productivity or is that slow people work after hours to try to make up for falling behind?
- balderdash 3y ago
  100% I feel like a lot of the time after hours work is driving by lack of productivity / prioritization / understanding “good enough”
  - caminante 3y ago
    I smile out of respect on calls when a subject matter lead says a. they've gotten as far as they can given incomplete inputs/scope b. and they're not going to prioritize further meetings until the lead provides what they need Not being a "team player" in a fuzzy sense is actually "helping the team" prioritize efficiently!
    - saiya-jin 3y ago
      You can't be a team player while being in 1-man team, and everybody else doing their own stuff not related to your goals. That's not much of a team work.
- ImaCake 3y ago
  They do mention it in passing, but there is no way to statistically control for that without a randomised controlled trial (or Mendelian Randomisation). There is no reason to think that working outside hours is the cause of the problem. It could be a consequence of an individual struggling outside of work that then leads to having to try to catch up.
- halfcat 3y ago
  > How do they control for… They don’t. It’s an observational, self-reporting study, which can only establish correlation, and not causation.
- 3y ago
greenyoda 3y ago
Big discussion from a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890
cedws 3y ago
>Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours >Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.
- butterlesstoast 3y ago
  You could say the opposite is true as well. How do you know after hours workers are not rating their productivity higher than actual? How do you know that the 9-5 workers aren’t rating their productivity as lower than usual? All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    “All data in of itself is useless”…what does that even mean? That’s like saying a chair in of itself is useless because no one is sitting in it. And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - richk449 3y ago
      > And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Now we are getting somewhere.
      - mym1990 3y ago
        I mean I can do mental gymnastics to understand the sentiment, but it really just comes down to individual preferences and definition of "use". To me, the usefulness of everything is in constant flux, and that's kind of cool to think about.
akomtu 3y ago
High performers don't need to put in extra hours, in other words. Big surprise.
- ascotan 3y ago
  I don't think this is a reflection on performance. seems like the key word here is "obligated" to work after hours. this is due to managers pushing deadlines on their reports. honestly this isn't much of a surprise. If your boss is obligating you to work after hours you are unhappy. one issue here asking engineers to work after hours in a 'you build it you own it' culture. in my mind this qualifies for being "obligated" to work outside of business hours. A more interesting item in the slide deck is that anyone that has more than 2 hours of meetings in a day has a loss of focus. I think it's conceivable to say that a heavy meeting culture may also force people to be "obligated" to work after hours because they have lost focus time in the day.
deviantbit 3y ago
Interesting. I found I wrote more, and better code once everyone left me alone.
seeknotfind 3y ago
For me, I'm most productive after hours because during the day, I get too many pings and escalations. After hours is the only time I can focus and get deep work done myself. This is something I'd really like to improve, but I'm really not sure how. I've tried creating discussion groups and many other approaches to make knowledge transfer more efficient. However, the real issue is company growth. A huge recent period of growth has meant a focus on training people. This is only the kind of thing I could defend against if I were 1-2 ranks higher in the company, and honestly, this lack of longterm growth planning is one of the reasons I would leave my company. One approach I've been thinking of experimenting with is saving everything I say, and using an LLM with my custom knowledge base to answer a question. I actually think a borg-like communication structure in a company could be really efficient. If every communication was publicly available, and we used ML to make that information consistent and to answer queries, I think you could achieve coherence with a company much faster, move as a unit much faster, and get a lot more done. However, it's still a pipe dream at this point due to the context length limits. The actual amount of important context at a company is many times what a model can keep in mind now. As models get bigger, or if a group can run multiple models many times to make the company info widely consistent, it would be much better. For instance imagine now, 30 people at your company work on one project, and 50 people work on another. They might take a slightly different definition for a term, and do work which is ultimately counterproductive to each other. Usually, it takes a conflict arising to resolve this, and people are long stuck with the mutually-incorrect definition. If an ML algorithm can look at everything both groups are saying and point out inefficiencies, I think you could get more cohesion, especially before problems get big enough to be a drain. That being said, this type of system is more of a pipe dream, and I don't think it will be feasible for a few more years. In the meantime, I'm struggling how to balance communication with work. Advice appreciated.
- twodave 3y ago
  I ran into this problem after a promotion and some company growth left me over a much larger footprint of our engineering department than I was used to. I ended up making a couple rules for myself and establishing a couple new routines, which all have helped: “Handbooking” - this is something I learned from reading about Gitlab and ended up adopting for my department. If it’s important, it goes into the handbook. If it’s not, then I probably don’t need to know it anyway. This alone took a lot of burden off me (people only ping me now if something is missing from the handbook or if they didn’t understand it, both of which are signals that the handbook needs work). Office hours - I don’t do this consistently, but when I feel like the interruptions are still too frequent I’ll just post some office ours in our dev channel and tell people they can bother me in a few 2-hour blocks that week. Otherwise I sit there and livestream whatever work it is that I’m doing for whomever is interested in that sort of thing. Trusting - I found much of my increased stress was a lack of faith in others to do a passable job of things, so I’d burden myself with them. In a lot of cases things went as badly as I expected by letting go, but my personal stress was reduced nonetheless.
darth_avocado 3y ago
The only people surprised would be the “MBA class” of management. Anyone who has ever worked any job would gladly tell you how productivity decreases if you work after hours. It’s not a revolutionary idea.
gnabgib 3y ago
Posted yesterday:[0] (190pts, 128 comments). Slack either changed the URL (fooling the dupe detector?), or mods made yesterday's title much less clickbaity. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890
jvans 3y ago
Less is more work posts are so trendy now. The comments invariably point out unexplored confounding variables and the posts lack sufficient substance to be interesting. At the end of the day you can reason that hours != productivity, which everyone knows by now
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
moaf 3y ago
The key point here is feeling obligated to work outside regular hours. My most productive time is early in the morning or late at night. There’s just less happening at that time, both professionally and personally. There are fewer interruptions and less need to context switch, making it easier to focus and get things done. Knowing that I’m more creative and productive outside normal business hours, I try to take brakes during the day because I know I’ll make up the time later. I’d much rather get out of the house and take an hour walk when the sun is up and work at night.
guhcampos 3y ago
How is that still surprising?
- danaris 3y ago
  Because far too many people still think that more hours worked directly and linearly translates to more productivity, with no upper bound.
lexandstuff 3y ago
For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat: "On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I personally do this a great deal. So many things that are not coding in life (from visiting museums to getting lunch with a friend to going to a government office to getting medical tests done) are far easier during normal work hours. Coding can be done at midnight, when none of those things can be done.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    I'm pretty much retired but I have zero sense of holidays. I always worked much more efficiently when everyone left the office, and 3 or 4 day weekends were always pure heaven. (I liked my work though.)
- gsuuon 3y ago
  I wonder if that means pursuing work-related personal ambitions (i.e. promotion), or outside-work personal ambitions (i.e. side projects)? Could side projects actually reduce burnout?
  - groby_b 3y ago
    Yes. If you want to pursue them, but not if you add a side project just to battle your burnout. A core part of burnout is lack of control, and a side project can give you that feeling back - if you do it for the joy of it.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  I read this as "who prefers to work non-standard workday" e.g. 11-7 which I used to do to avoid traffic. I really enjoyed it and the slower morning was really helpful for me. early morning stand-ups post-pandemic really killed my morning happiness.
nikau 3y ago
Seems this is very cultural, eg in Japan there is an expectation that you must always work back late, so people don't give 100% for 8 hrs as they know regardless of performance they will need to put in more hours of overtime.
kazinator 3y ago
Those who feel on top of their work don't feel they have to catch up on work after hours? Where is the surprise?
what 3y ago
Dupe from yesterday (128 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890
fma 3y ago
People who feel obligated to work after work hours also are probably in a poor work culture company. I log off when I went to log off and if I have an idea or a reason to work at night I do it. If I feel it's not productive I sleep early and do it in the morning. Those who feel obligated could also be doing it to look good to their boss.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
7e 3y ago
Simplest explanation: the lowest performing employees feel the need to work after hours to keep up. Few people start out working more hours than necessary.
bofaGuy 3y ago
> “Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours.” Maybe people who are less productive end up having to work more hours.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  This reminds of the Dilbert about marriage + happiness: https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_relationships.jpg https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_r...
- zmmmmm 3y ago
  I agree, I think it's mixing up cause and effect. Especially how it is phrased with "feel obligated", it's clear these are people who are conscientious about their productivity and most likely set a higher bar for their output. It's hard to think their out of hours work is causing their loss of productivity, rather their work environment is causing it and only the people who feel bad about it (ie: would report that their productivity wasn't adequate) actually work longer hours to compensate.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Or equally. Maybe people who are well organised are more productive. Which, personally, I think is self evident.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  I think that the clear result here is: Workers who feel they're less productive work more. Which makes perfect sense. Workers who feel they're less productive may be more likely to try to compensate or worried that they will be fired.
sublinear 3y ago
My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It's not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won't know until you start. What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it. Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain. What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
- dannycastonguay 3y ago
  Agreed. It's important to put enough effort that you find meaning in your work, but not so much that it ruins your wellbeing. Here's a rough algorithm that works for me: 1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task. 2. Double it and let the team know you did that. 3. Do the work well including good documentation. 4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope. 5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule. Cheers
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I agree. This requires a healthy workplace though. I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again. It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)
killjoywashere 3y ago
I saw a sign in a cubicle farm one time: "In every group, someone's the weakest. If you don't know who that is, it's you." Fuck that.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  The person who put up that sign is desperate for reassurance.
makeitdouble 3y ago
The subtitle of this piece: > Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction The base assumption of the employer structuring and managing the employee's well-being and satisfaction feels so 19th century. I know it's still the prevalent paradigm in HR in most places, but it's crazy how hard that idea persists.
hackerlight 3y ago
> Employees who feel obligated to work after-hours register 20% lower productivity scores Very notably, this excludes people who want to work after-hours. A rare person but they do exist in some fields.
dijit 3y ago
Before I thought I had ADHD I would sit around the office not doing much of anything in a sort of "ready" state, ready to jump on the next thing someone would try to distract me with or "ready" for the next meeting that is sometimes more than an hour away. It's only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(
- ianmcgowan 3y ago
  That sounds like my self-diagnosed ADHD - I have exactly the same thing. What changed your mind about having ADHD?
  - goalonetwo 3y ago
    That scenario speaks to me as well but it seems to be more an issue with modern society than anything else. Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it?
    - cromulent 3y ago
      > Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it? I would have agreed a couple of years ago but since then I have become considerably enlightened about neurodiversity and how differently brains can work.
      - goalonetwo 3y ago
        I would love to learn more about this. My assumptions is that everyone is dealing with this issues but some people are able to push through with motivation/discipline and the right environment. I'm not convinced that calling "ADHD" anytime we have a hard time doing something is the right way to recognize that we now live in a society that is absolutely full of small dopamine hits.
        3y ago
tglobs 3y ago
Anyone have a link to the wordings of the original questions asked?
Eumenes 3y ago
I have alot of colleagues that avoid their actual work by taking on pet projects or some cross functional nonsense. I have a colleague that takes calls with vendors almost weekly, knowing there's no budget for it. Someone who spends hours with HR or recruiting on some DEI stuff. Someone who wants to be a professional conference speaker. Almost anything to avoid coding. Meanwhile, those of us that simply log on to do work have to pick up their slack. Management doesn't care. I understand this isn't the case everywhere but happiness equates to doing less for some. I don't engage in those projects and I'm very productive.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
The 8 hour work day: created for physical laborers, extended to paper-pushers, and forced onto creative workers along with productivity-sapping random meetings. The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient. The theory that a business will naturally optimize for efficiency does not survive a meeting with human culture, which has nothing at all to do with organizational efficiency, and everything to do with repetition, imitation, resistance to change, and the easiest short-term path. If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient Of course it's inefficient. If you don't have a dictator saying what to do, then people deciding between themselves to try stuff won't always get it right. But it seems to work better than everything else in the long term. > If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home. No one just does this, and lots of companies don't even do it. Working times are mostly so that there are work overlap times so people can communicate and not be blocked on things.
lolive 3y ago
47 here. And 20 years of dev experience. I am now hired by a big company. As far as I understand, it is to become a “manager” (==a politician). So now I spend my days having pointless meetings with bozos. Because of the poor management, we have had reorganizations and budget cuts all along the year. Making proper work impossible. So now, I simply code what we need, after hours. This is exhausting, as it is double days. But extremely valuable in the end.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's good that you have ownership of the problem, but make sure you get something out of it. If someone else will get credit for your hard work, you will experience explosive demotivation.
  - lolive 3y ago
    That happened today, as our demo was successful and the team collectively reached a level of applied theory that is matching the expectations of our stakeholders. Truth is that the addition of the word “applied” to that last sentence is 100% my effort. But my point of view is that everybody will get benefit from that effort, and we can now make everyone understand that the theory that my team has been pushing for months is really good. No one of the team could have achieved that [because of their poor understanding of those pesky “implantation details”]. So i just did it.
aussieguy1234 3y ago
"employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores." So, if, like alot of Hacker News readers, you're hacking away on your next startup idea after hours, you should be fine.
stochastimus 3y ago
> working less is good > blog by “Slack” True or false, the jokes write themselves sometimes
osigurdson 3y ago
We all know that working your ass off is the way to get things done. The problem is, in most companies, no one can tell the difference between hard working people and folks who take it easy. If a project takes 6 months it must have been hard if it takes 6 weeks on the other hand it must have been easy. No one is going to run the experiment twice.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
My strategy: * Work for a small company * Show up at 10am * Leave at 4pm If I'm really into what I'm doing I'll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I'm doing it a secret (don't push commits, just keep changes local).
hasoleju 3y ago
I have been there. I was working long hours because work was exciting. And also I wanted to show my boss that I put in a lot of effort. I voluntarily spent a lot of time in the office to finish tasks more early than expected. Sometimes this extra time was completely unproductive and the things I did turned out to be irrelevant a few days later. Sometimes it was very important for the business that things got finished and the extra time was therefor productive. I learned for myself, that I cannot sustain working long hours regularly without loosing interest in the job. Right now my mantra is: Keep showing up. For me this means get work done on a regular basis. My focus is to work on this topic for years without loosing interest, instead of prioritizing to finish the current workload as fast as possible. Real productivity is achieved when you are an expert in the domain and you have built a network in the company or market segment. Expertise and personal network are the main levers to get thins done.
- dutchCourage 3y ago
  I noticed this as well. When I was freelancing I would sometimes get inspired and motivated and work til 10pm or later, not because of a deadline but because I felt like it. Each time, I noticed the next day was rather slow. I was more tired and less inspired. Forcing myself to stop after 6pm worked wonders, I would wake up the next day easily, my brain overflowing with new ideas. On top of that I'd manage to sustain that motivation for several days or even weeks in a row.
intrepidsoldier 3y ago
Have they considered how Slack contributes to decreased productivity?
goodpoint 3y ago
"surprising"? It's very well known and nowadays well proven by neuroscience.
bananamerica 3y ago
Is that really surprising to anyone?
foobarbecue 3y ago
What is this "productivity score"? Did they just ask people if they feel productive and call that a "score"? I couldn't find that info in the article.
elzbardico 3y ago
Two factors: Scrum and its idiotic sprints, especially two weeks sprints. Sometimes things are more complicated than what they seemed, and maybe they just need a couple more days. In the overall scheme of things, no big deal, yeah, from time to time, things take more time than expected, the world is not going to end because of one or two days in 99% of the circumstances. Sometimes you win, sometimes lose and all that jazz. But, then the sprint is over tomorrow, a one day delay becomes a two week delay, demoralization and demotivation ensue, trust is fucked, and it is all downhill from that point. Second point, closely related to this one, is the strange idea that some managers have that any delay can be solved by the copious administration of more overhead. Let's schedule more meetings! Let's micromanage more! Of course, the developers are slacking! Beatings to rescue. And this is related to the first one, because this kind of manager is usually a True Believer in Scrum. Over time, developers, like any other animal, is mentally geared towards avoiding pain. Shortcuts will be taken, and one of the most obvious is overtime. And at first it works, overtime actually works a lot of time, until it is chronical.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
This is a pretty fraught area. As the comments show, there's a lot of emotion, and cultural differences at play. "Cultural differences" can be macro, like, in Japan, a 10-12-hour workday is de rigueur, and it can be "micro," like individuals that have different clocks. I had an employee, who is, no exaggeration, one of the best engineers I've ever known. But he couldn't come in early, to save his life. He'd roll in, around noon, but would often stay until 2AM. The Japanese loved him. He was often on their time zone. American HR hated it, and I got called on the carpet, numerous times, as his manager. But I stood up for him, and let him do his odd hours, even though it cost me. Fortunately, Japan backed me, and they were the ones in charge (that didn't win me any friends on this side of the pond). I have been "retired" for the last six years. In that time, I have worked harder -and far more productively- than I ever did, in the workforce. The key seems to be, as has been alluded in the comments, mastery of my own schedule.
rlkf 3y ago
Seldom has the "surprised Pikachu" emoticon been more appropriate.
Aerbil313 3y ago
[flagged]

328 points by tchalla 3y ago

Wow, slaves perform worse when tired! What a discovery... Fck any employer with required "off hours" and wage formulas for compensation. Actually ... fck off hours.

simplypeter 3y ago

There is no way that climbing the stairs to the 10th floor will be as fast as climbing to the 1st or 8th floor, let alone the 10th floor. The same applies to working hours. There's no way you'll be as productive in the 10th hour as you were in your first hour.

fleischhauf 3y ago
I don't fully get the analogy. 10th floor is higher than 1st or 8th, so then you would get more work done? You can certainly climb 10 floors with the same speed as 1 or 8..
- nikau 3y ago
  Replace 10 with the highest floor your muscles can go to before they are exhausted
FredPret 3y ago
Brains aren’t like quadriceps. I get more productive as I work longer and build momentum. More and more concepts are loaded in memory, so to speak. To me, it’s more like speeding up until I hit the wall on the tenth floor.
- balderdash 3y ago
  I’m of two minds on this a. It depends if we are building or thinking - building definitely benefits from more time, and feel like I get momentum (as you described), implementing something over 12+hr sprint is hugely productive for me. On the other hand if I have a problem to solve I’m completely unproductive trying to do it at 3am.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  sure but cache warming works on the order of 30 minutes

PedroBatista 3y ago

Surprising huh? If the wording and subjects presented in the "article" sound a bit like Bill Lumbergh with a polo shirt was the author, don't forget Slack is Salesforce now.

kortilla 3y ago

How do they control for the fact that people who are falling behind frequently work more after hours? Is it that after hours works causes loss of productivity or is that slow people work after hours to try to make up for falling behind?

balderdash 3y ago
100% I feel like a lot of the time after hours work is driving by lack of productivity / prioritization / understanding “good enough”
- caminante 3y ago
  I smile out of respect on calls when a subject matter lead says a. they've gotten as far as they can given incomplete inputs/scope b. and they're not going to prioritize further meetings until the lead provides what they need Not being a "team player" in a fuzzy sense is actually "helping the team" prioritize efficiently!
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    You can't be a team player while being in 1-man team, and everybody else doing their own stuff not related to your goals. That's not much of a team work.
ImaCake 3y ago
They do mention it in passing, but there is no way to statistically control for that without a randomised controlled trial (or Mendelian Randomisation). There is no reason to think that working outside hours is the cause of the problem. It could be a consequence of an individual struggling outside of work that then leads to having to try to catch up.
halfcat 3y ago
> How do they control for… They don’t. It’s an observational, self-reporting study, which can only establish correlation, and not causation.
3y ago

greenyoda 3y ago

Big discussion from a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

cedws 3y ago

>Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours >Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.

butterlesstoast 3y ago
You could say the opposite is true as well. How do you know after hours workers are not rating their productivity higher than actual? How do you know that the 9-5 workers aren’t rating their productivity as lower than usual? All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
- mym1990 3y ago
  “All data in of itself is useless”…what does that even mean? That’s like saying a chair in of itself is useless because no one is sitting in it. And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - richk449 3y ago
    > And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Now we are getting somewhere.
    - mym1990 3y ago
      I mean I can do mental gymnastics to understand the sentiment, but it really just comes down to individual preferences and definition of "use". To me, the usefulness of everything is in constant flux, and that's kind of cool to think about.

akomtu 3y ago

High performers don't need to put in extra hours, in other words. Big surprise.

ascotan 3y ago
I don't think this is a reflection on performance. seems like the key word here is "obligated" to work after hours. this is due to managers pushing deadlines on their reports. honestly this isn't much of a surprise. If your boss is obligating you to work after hours you are unhappy. one issue here asking engineers to work after hours in a 'you build it you own it' culture. in my mind this qualifies for being "obligated" to work outside of business hours. A more interesting item in the slide deck is that anyone that has more than 2 hours of meetings in a day has a loss of focus. I think it's conceivable to say that a heavy meeting culture may also force people to be "obligated" to work after hours because they have lost focus time in the day.

deviantbit 3y ago

Interesting. I found I wrote more, and better code once everyone left me alone.

seeknotfind 3y ago

For me, I'm most productive after hours because during the day, I get too many pings and escalations. After hours is the only time I can focus and get deep work done myself. This is something I'd really like to improve, but I'm really not sure how. I've tried creating discussion groups and many other approaches to make knowledge transfer more efficient. However, the real issue is company growth. A huge recent period of growth has meant a focus on training people. This is only the kind of thing I could defend against if I were 1-2 ranks higher in the company, and honestly, this lack of longterm growth planning is one of the reasons I would leave my company. One approach I've been thinking of experimenting with is saving everything I say, and using an LLM with my custom knowledge base to answer a question. I actually think a borg-like communication structure in a company could be really efficient. If every communication was publicly available, and we used ML to make that information consistent and to answer queries, I think you could achieve coherence with a company much faster, move as a unit much faster, and get a lot more done. However, it's still a pipe dream at this point due to the context length limits. The actual amount of important context at a company is many times what a model can keep in mind now. As models get bigger, or if a group can run multiple models many times to make the company info widely consistent, it would be much better. For instance imagine now, 30 people at your company work on one project, and 50 people work on another. They might take a slightly different definition for a term, and do work which is ultimately counterproductive to each other. Usually, it takes a conflict arising to resolve this, and people are long stuck with the mutually-incorrect definition. If an ML algorithm can look at everything both groups are saying and point out inefficiencies, I think you could get more cohesion, especially before problems get big enough to be a drain. That being said, this type of system is more of a pipe dream, and I don't think it will be feasible for a few more years. In the meantime, I'm struggling how to balance communication with work. Advice appreciated.

twodave 3y ago
I ran into this problem after a promotion and some company growth left me over a much larger footprint of our engineering department than I was used to. I ended up making a couple rules for myself and establishing a couple new routines, which all have helped: “Handbooking” - this is something I learned from reading about Gitlab and ended up adopting for my department. If it’s important, it goes into the handbook. If it’s not, then I probably don’t need to know it anyway. This alone took a lot of burden off me (people only ping me now if something is missing from the handbook or if they didn’t understand it, both of which are signals that the handbook needs work). Office hours - I don’t do this consistently, but when I feel like the interruptions are still too frequent I’ll just post some office ours in our dev channel and tell people they can bother me in a few 2-hour blocks that week. Otherwise I sit there and livestream whatever work it is that I’m doing for whomever is interested in that sort of thing. Trusting - I found much of my increased stress was a lack of faith in others to do a passable job of things, so I’d burden myself with them. In a lot of cases things went as badly as I expected by letting go, but my personal stress was reduced nonetheless.

darth_avocado 3y ago

The only people surprised would be the “MBA class” of management. Anyone who has ever worked any job would gladly tell you how productivity decreases if you work after hours. It’s not a revolutionary idea.

gnabgib 3y ago

Posted yesterday:[0] (190pts, 128 comments). Slack either changed the URL (fooling the dupe detector?), or mods made yesterday's title much less clickbaity. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

jvans 3y ago

Less is more work posts are so trendy now. The comments invariably point out unexplored confounding variables and the posts lack sufficient substance to be interesting. At the end of the day you can reason that hours != productivity, which everyone knows by now

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moaf 3y ago

The key point here is feeling obligated to work outside regular hours. My most productive time is early in the morning or late at night. There’s just less happening at that time, both professionally and personally. There are fewer interruptions and less need to context switch, making it easier to focus and get things done. Knowing that I’m more creative and productive outside normal business hours, I try to take brakes during the day because I know I’ll make up the time later. I’d much rather get out of the house and take an hour walk when the sun is up and work at night.

guhcampos 3y ago

How is that still surprising?

danaris 3y ago
Because far too many people still think that more hours worked directly and linearly translates to more productivity, with no upper bound.

lexandstuff 3y ago

For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat: "On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."

MattGaiser 3y ago
I personally do this a great deal. So many things that are not coding in life (from visiting museums to getting lunch with a friend to going to a government office to getting medical tests done) are far easier during normal work hours. Coding can be done at midnight, when none of those things can be done.
- tomcam 3y ago
  I'm pretty much retired but I have zero sense of holidays. I always worked much more efficiently when everyone left the office, and 3 or 4 day weekends were always pure heaven. (I liked my work though.)
gsuuon 3y ago
I wonder if that means pursuing work-related personal ambitions (i.e. promotion), or outside-work personal ambitions (i.e. side projects)? Could side projects actually reduce burnout?
- groby_b 3y ago
  Yes. If you want to pursue them, but not if you add a side project just to battle your burnout. A core part of burnout is lack of control, and a side project can give you that feeling back - if you do it for the joy of it.
LesZedCB 3y ago
I read this as "who prefers to work non-standard workday" e.g. 11-7 which I used to do to avoid traffic. I really enjoyed it and the slower morning was really helpful for me. early morning stand-ups post-pandemic really killed my morning happiness.

nikau 3y ago

Seems this is very cultural, eg in Japan there is an expectation that you must always work back late, so people don't give 100% for 8 hrs as they know regardless of performance they will need to put in more hours of overtime.

kazinator 3y ago

Those who feel on top of their work don't feel they have to catch up on work after hours? Where is the surprise?

what 3y ago

Dupe from yesterday (128 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

fma 3y ago

People who feel obligated to work after work hours also are probably in a poor work culture company. I log off when I went to log off and if I have an idea or a reason to work at night I do it. If I feel it's not productive I sleep early and do it in the morning. Those who feel obligated could also be doing it to look good to their boss.

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7e 3y ago

Simplest explanation: the lowest performing employees feel the need to work after hours to keep up. Few people start out working more hours than necessary.

bofaGuy 3y ago

> “Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours.” Maybe people who are less productive end up having to work more hours.

paulddraper 3y ago
This reminds of the Dilbert about marriage + happiness: https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_relationships.jpg https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_r...
zmmmmm 3y ago
I agree, I think it's mixing up cause and effect. Especially how it is phrased with "feel obligated", it's clear these are people who are conscientious about their productivity and most likely set a higher bar for their output. It's hard to think their out of hours work is causing their loss of productivity, rather their work environment is causing it and only the people who feel bad about it (ie: would report that their productivity wasn't adequate) actually work longer hours to compensate.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
Or equally. Maybe people who are well organised are more productive. Which, personally, I think is self evident.
nostrebored 3y ago
I think that the clear result here is: Workers who feel they're less productive work more. Which makes perfect sense. Workers who feel they're less productive may be more likely to try to compensate or worried that they will be fired.

sublinear 3y ago

My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It's not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won't know until you start. What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it. Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain. What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.

dannycastonguay 3y ago
Agreed. It's important to put enough effort that you find meaning in your work, but not so much that it ruins your wellbeing. Here's a rough algorithm that works for me: 1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task. 2. Double it and let the team know you did that. 3. Do the work well including good documentation. 4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope. 5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule. Cheers
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I agree. This requires a healthy workplace though. I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again. It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)

killjoywashere 3y ago

I saw a sign in a cubicle farm one time: "In every group, someone's the weakest. If you don't know who that is, it's you." Fuck that.

goodpoint 3y ago
The person who put up that sign is desperate for reassurance.

makeitdouble 3y ago

The subtitle of this piece: > Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction The base assumption of the employer structuring and managing the employee's well-being and satisfaction feels so 19th century. I know it's still the prevalent paradigm in HR in most places, but it's crazy how hard that idea persists.

hackerlight 3y ago

> Employees who feel obligated to work after-hours register 20% lower productivity scores Very notably, this excludes people who want to work after-hours. A rare person but they do exist in some fields.

dijit 3y ago

Before I thought I had ADHD I would sit around the office not doing much of anything in a sort of "ready" state, ready to jump on the next thing someone would try to distract me with or "ready" for the next meeting that is sometimes more than an hour away. It's only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(

ianmcgowan 3y ago
That sounds like my self-diagnosed ADHD - I have exactly the same thing. What changed your mind about having ADHD?
- goalonetwo 3y ago
  That scenario speaks to me as well but it seems to be more an issue with modern society than anything else. Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it?
  - cromulent 3y ago
    > Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it? I would have agreed a couple of years ago but since then I have become considerably enlightened about neurodiversity and how differently brains can work.
    - goalonetwo 3y ago
      I would love to learn more about this. My assumptions is that everyone is dealing with this issues but some people are able to push through with motivation/discipline and the right environment. I'm not convinced that calling "ADHD" anytime we have a hard time doing something is the right way to recognize that we now live in a society that is absolutely full of small dopamine hits.
      - 3y ago

tglobs 3y ago

Anyone have a link to the wordings of the original questions asked?

Eumenes 3y ago

I have alot of colleagues that avoid their actual work by taking on pet projects or some cross functional nonsense. I have a colleague that takes calls with vendors almost weekly, knowing there's no budget for it. Someone who spends hours with HR or recruiting on some DEI stuff. Someone who wants to be a professional conference speaker. Almost anything to avoid coding. Meanwhile, those of us that simply log on to do work have to pick up their slack. Management doesn't care. I understand this isn't the case everywhere but happiness equates to doing less for some. I don't engage in those projects and I'm very productive.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

The 8 hour work day: created for physical laborers, extended to paper-pushers, and forced onto creative workers along with productivity-sapping random meetings. The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient. The theory that a business will naturally optimize for efficiency does not survive a meeting with human culture, which has nothing at all to do with organizational efficiency, and everything to do with repetition, imitation, resistance to change, and the easiest short-term path. If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient Of course it's inefficient. If you don't have a dictator saying what to do, then people deciding between themselves to try stuff won't always get it right. But it seems to work better than everything else in the long term. > If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home. No one just does this, and lots of companies don't even do it. Working times are mostly so that there are work overlap times so people can communicate and not be blocked on things.

lolive 3y ago

47 here. And 20 years of dev experience. I am now hired by a big company. As far as I understand, it is to become a “manager” (==a politician). So now I spend my days having pointless meetings with bozos. Because of the poor management, we have had reorganizations and budget cuts all along the year. Making proper work impossible. So now, I simply code what we need, after hours. This is exhausting, as it is double days. But extremely valuable in the end.

robertlagrant 3y ago
It's good that you have ownership of the problem, but make sure you get something out of it. If someone else will get credit for your hard work, you will experience explosive demotivation.
- lolive 3y ago
  That happened today, as our demo was successful and the team collectively reached a level of applied theory that is matching the expectations of our stakeholders. Truth is that the addition of the word “applied” to that last sentence is 100% my effort. But my point of view is that everybody will get benefit from that effort, and we can now make everyone understand that the theory that my team has been pushing for months is really good. No one of the team could have achieved that [because of their poor understanding of those pesky “implantation details”]. So i just did it.

aussieguy1234 3y ago

"employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores." So, if, like alot of Hacker News readers, you're hacking away on your next startup idea after hours, you should be fine.

stochastimus 3y ago

> working less is good > blog by “Slack” True or false, the jokes write themselves sometimes

osigurdson 3y ago

We all know that working your ass off is the way to get things done. The problem is, in most companies, no one can tell the difference between hard working people and folks who take it easy. If a project takes 6 months it must have been hard if it takes 6 weeks on the other hand it must have been easy. No one is going to run the experiment twice.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

My strategy: * Work for a small company * Show up at 10am * Leave at 4pm If I'm really into what I'm doing I'll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I'm doing it a secret (don't push commits, just keep changes local).

hasoleju 3y ago

I have been there. I was working long hours because work was exciting. And also I wanted to show my boss that I put in a lot of effort. I voluntarily spent a lot of time in the office to finish tasks more early than expected. Sometimes this extra time was completely unproductive and the things I did turned out to be irrelevant a few days later. Sometimes it was very important for the business that things got finished and the extra time was therefor productive. I learned for myself, that I cannot sustain working long hours regularly without loosing interest in the job. Right now my mantra is: Keep showing up. For me this means get work done on a regular basis. My focus is to work on this topic for years without loosing interest, instead of prioritizing to finish the current workload as fast as possible. Real productivity is achieved when you are an expert in the domain and you have built a network in the company or market segment. Expertise and personal network are the main levers to get thins done.

dutchCourage 3y ago
I noticed this as well. When I was freelancing I would sometimes get inspired and motivated and work til 10pm or later, not because of a deadline but because I felt like it. Each time, I noticed the next day was rather slow. I was more tired and less inspired. Forcing myself to stop after 6pm worked wonders, I would wake up the next day easily, my brain overflowing with new ideas. On top of that I'd manage to sustain that motivation for several days or even weeks in a row.

intrepidsoldier 3y ago

Have they considered how Slack contributes to decreased productivity?

goodpoint 3y ago

"surprising"? It's very well known and nowadays well proven by neuroscience.

bananamerica 3y ago

Is that really surprising to anyone?

foobarbecue 3y ago

What is this "productivity score"? Did they just ask people if they feel productive and call that a "score"? I couldn't find that info in the article.

elzbardico 3y ago

Two factors: Scrum and its idiotic sprints, especially two weeks sprints. Sometimes things are more complicated than what they seemed, and maybe they just need a couple more days. In the overall scheme of things, no big deal, yeah, from time to time, things take more time than expected, the world is not going to end because of one or two days in 99% of the circumstances. Sometimes you win, sometimes lose and all that jazz. But, then the sprint is over tomorrow, a one day delay becomes a two week delay, demoralization and demotivation ensue, trust is fucked, and it is all downhill from that point. Second point, closely related to this one, is the strange idea that some managers have that any delay can be solved by the copious administration of more overhead. Let's schedule more meetings! Let's micromanage more! Of course, the developers are slacking! Beatings to rescue. And this is related to the first one, because this kind of manager is usually a True Believer in Scrum. Over time, developers, like any other animal, is mentally geared towards avoiding pain. Shortcuts will be taken, and one of the most obvious is overtime. And at first it works, overtime actually works a lot of time, until it is chronical.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

This is a pretty fraught area. As the comments show, there's a lot of emotion, and cultural differences at play. "Cultural differences" can be macro, like, in Japan, a 10-12-hour workday is de rigueur, and it can be "micro," like individuals that have different clocks. I had an employee, who is, no exaggeration, one of the best engineers I've ever known. But he couldn't come in early, to save his life. He'd roll in, around noon, but would often stay until 2AM. The Japanese loved him. He was often on their time zone. American HR hated it, and I got called on the carpet, numerous times, as his manager. But I stood up for him, and let him do his odd hours, even though it cost me. Fortunately, Japan backed me, and they were the ones in charge (that didn't win me any friends on this side of the pond). I have been "retired" for the last six years. In that time, I have worked harder -and far more productively- than I ever did, in the workforce. The key seems to be, as has been alluded in the comments, mastery of my own schedule.

rlkf 3y ago

Seldom has the "surprised Pikachu" emoticon been more appropriate.

Aerbil313 3y ago

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