6 ms·

Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

84 points by MarlonPro 15y ago

plg 15y ago
makes total sense. why work > 40 hrs per week if you're already making an annual salary of $30,491,613 (2011, Wikipedia)... $14,659 per hr assuming 52 weeks x 40 hrs/week.
greenyoda 15y ago
I'd be curious to know whether Sheryl Sandberg's staff are also allowed to leave at 5:30. Or is this just a privilege available to a senior executive, which she might never even consider granting to her underlings? I'd be more impressed to hear that software developers at Facebook could work the same hours. Anyone at Facebook have any insights on this?
- nbm 15y ago
  I don't know about staff closer to Sheryl (ie, not in e), but there are definitely many software and other engineers working 40-45 hours a week fairly standardly, and I seemingly don't hear enough negative chatter about it for me to recall hearing any.
zht 15y ago
If only Facebook allowed their employees to work only 40 hours a week instead of forcing them to work nights and weekends during lock down periods. She seems extremely out of touch with the workload for Facebook engineers. http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/06/facebook-lockdown-google-me/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/06/facebook-lockdown-google-m...
- deleted 15y ago
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- deleted 15y ago
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- alexgartrell 15y ago
  I work at Facebook, do not work very many hours (9:30-5:30 most days, including breakfast, lunch and sometimes an hour-long workout at the gym), and have never heard so much as a suggestion that I work more. This was also true during lockdown. The truth is, if you are capable of getting a lot of shit done, people are just happy that you're able to give them a lot, they don't squeeze every productive second out of you. I attribute the 24/7 lockdown stuff to people who wear it as a badge of honor (that's exactly how Carnegie Mellon was, at least).
- nbm 15y ago
  People aren't forced to work nights and weekends during lockdown, although some teams may up their expectations for people to do that. I haven't been on a high-priority project for a lockdown, but I imagine it is possible that some go overboard. I also imagine it is likely that the guys who have good reasons to not stay late or work weekends also teach the guys that go overboard a thing or two much of the time. Working a few nights and weekends for a known short period of time is different from a death march, making it a habit, or having a culture that expects it all the time. Much like I imagine Sheryl does a few late nights in a row and an impacted weekend every once in a while to overcome some time-sensitive hurdles to the company's success. The message is that the company is going to make it easy to work on and focus on the particular high-priority projects you are involved in by increasing the rate and operating hours for shuttles and kitchens, and making it even more culturally acceptable (and even dutiful) to avoid distractions like meetings, lower-priority projects, and so forth. Obstacles to getting work done, whether during usual office hours (which are already not that usual) or not, are reduced or removed. For me, the lockdown concept gave me an opportunity to consider working on more important things than the things that just happened to be in my tasks list, my appointment calendar, what people in team meetings thought was important, and so forth. Lower-value meetings started happening less frequently or being indefinitely postponed. In terms of time, I think I ended up working less at the end of lockdown than I did before it started.
rollypolly 15y ago
In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week. The fact that it's illegal doesn't mean it's not happening.
- njs12345 15y ago
  It's certainly not illegal in the UK if the employee signs a waiver when hired: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029426 http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHour... (see "Opting out of the 48 hour week")
  - bmj 15y ago
    Is this typical for, say, the software industry there? I wonder if it's the equivalent of non-competes and intellectual property agreements here: ubiquitous enough that most people don't even blink when they are part of an employment contract.
    - AlisdairO 15y ago
      In the UK it's fairly typical to work a 37.5 hour working week in the software industry, with 20-25 days vacation. I work at $BIGCORP and work approximately those hours, as do the vast majority of my coworkers (apart from at intermittent crunch periods). My experience in previous businesses was roughly the same, as is that of my friends in other companies - apart from a couple who work longer because they want to. This does not apply to the (much higher paid) work available in programming in the banking sector, where substantially longer work weeks are typical.
      - njs12345 15y ago
        You'll definitely get one for any finance job, even an internship. Interestingly, they can't compel you to sign, but if you don't sign, they make you jump through all kinds of hoops w.r.t reporting your hours and such and mire you in so much bureaucracy you can't get anything done.
bishnu 15y ago
Sheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30; she doesn't stop working at 5:30 [1]. In that same article it goes to great lengths to talk about how late she stays up working and how early she would start to ensure people didn't think she was a slacker. [1] http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg-can-leave-early-why-arent-you.html http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg...
- deleted 15y ago
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- rkudeshi 15y ago
  I believe that was in reference to what she USED to do, to avoid the slacker stigma. Now she works less hours, proudly.
overshard 15y ago
What bothers me is that it matters how long someone works in a week. If you are getting payed for a 40 hour work week then you should only work 40 hours a week. If you are getting paid hourly (as I do) who cares as long as stuff is getting done. Some weeks I work 20 hours, some I work 60 it just depends on my workload and mood. If you want to work 40 hours a week and be done then go for it, good for you. If you want to work 60 hours a week, also good for you. The problem comes with you start judging other people by how long they work, just because someone goes home at 5 every day doesn't mean they don't care about their jobs...
- w0utert 15y ago
  ^ this Hours worked must be one of the worst metrics for performance, productivity, efficiency or commitment. I don't know why people in some countries or cultures are so obsessed with how long they work, or how few days they take off. Or actually, maybe I do know why, but it has nothing to do with 'amount of work done' or 'quality of work'. I think that more often than not, the people consistently putting in the most hours are those who take the longest to finish stuff, and care the least about the quality of their output. Anyone can sit behind a desk 10 hours a day to impress the boss. IMO no metric used to assess performance or productivity should include the number of hours present in the office. Instead of 'hours worked this week' or 'number of days worked this year', the metric should be 'total number of hours to finish the job', preferably divided by a factor based on the 'amount of rework or support required afterwards' and/or multiplied by a factor based on the flexibility of the person doing the work, both in terms of availability as well as skill set. Of course some of these things are hard to track on a spreadsheet, so they are rarely used. Long story short: just try to do the best job you can in the most efficient way possible, without turning into a bean counter, just because that's the best way to impress your superior.
  - MarlonPro 15y ago
    Great point! Getting things done in 40 or less hours a week is a great feat. Now, "being busy" for more than that amount of hours is not.
  - kennu 15y ago
temphn 15y ago
Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130 This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. Lessons from Yishan Wong, Director of Engineering at Facebook: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-determine-if-you-are-ready-to-join-a-startup Working at a startup doesn't necessarily mean long hours, but it does mean that it's not the hours that count, it's the results. If you need to work 80 hours to get something done by next week, you will need to do it because otherwise the startup might die - in a large company, this might just result in some mild consequences. Startup life tends to go in bursts. You should be comfortable with this. Had Mark Zuckerberg left at 5pm in the middle of the news feed crunch, the company probably would have died before it was able to pay Sheryl Sandberg so much money to work 40 hours a week. Instead they coded 48 hours straight.
- j_baker 15y ago
  Well that was certainly nice of him. Did you have any evidence that Sandberg's strategy is wrong for her or even the majority of people in the tech industry, or were you under the impression that an anecdote from a completely unrelated incident years before would actually prove something?
- wpietri 15y ago
  I believe the difference is "normal" versus "emergency". My startup aims for a sane work-week, but if something caught on fire I would be there until the fire was put out. As long as that happens rarely, it's not a problem. And you keep it that way by carefully analyzing each fire and making sure that you solve the root causes.
mea36 15y ago
As a woman in a start up and indeed generally as a member of a start up, I find this recent uproar about Sheryl Sandberg quite frustrating. I'll admit that I didn't watch the interview that she just did. However, I did see her speak this past year at the Grace Hopper Conference. Yes, she goes home at 5.30 to eat with her kids, but in this digital age it doesn't mean she is done with work. She just uses technology to timeshift and work when it best fits into her life. She goes home so she can be with her kids while they are awake but she's still responding to emails and does work after her kids are asleep. This is the beauty of digital age. While I don't have kids, or a even significant other, I do, however, have a personal life that I refuse to sacrifice because I am in a start up. I'm sure many of you feel the same; this means I do work, I go out with my friends, come home and do more work. Maybe I wake up earlier then everyone else, work on weekends, etc. This is no different than what Sandberg does.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  Be productive, ignore the haters, do your thing.

84 points by MarlonPro 15y ago

plg 15y ago

makes total sense. why work > 40 hrs per week if you're already making an annual salary of $30,491,613 (2011, Wikipedia)... $14,659 per hr assuming 52 weeks x 40 hrs/week.

greenyoda 15y ago

I'd be curious to know whether Sheryl Sandberg's staff are also allowed to leave at 5:30. Or is this just a privilege available to a senior executive, which she might never even consider granting to her underlings? I'd be more impressed to hear that software developers at Facebook could work the same hours. Anyone at Facebook have any insights on this?

nbm 15y ago
I don't know about staff closer to Sheryl (ie, not in e), but there are definitely many software and other engineers working 40-45 hours a week fairly standardly, and I seemingly don't hear enough negative chatter about it for me to recall hearing any.

zht 15y ago

If only Facebook allowed their employees to work only 40 hours a week instead of forcing them to work nights and weekends during lock down periods. She seems extremely out of touch with the workload for Facebook engineers. http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/06/facebook-lockdown-google-me/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/06/facebook-lockdown-google-m...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
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alexgartrell 15y ago
I work at Facebook, do not work very many hours (9:30-5:30 most days, including breakfast, lunch and sometimes an hour-long workout at the gym), and have never heard so much as a suggestion that I work more. This was also true during lockdown. The truth is, if you are capable of getting a lot of shit done, people are just happy that you're able to give them a lot, they don't squeeze every productive second out of you. I attribute the 24/7 lockdown stuff to people who wear it as a badge of honor (that's exactly how Carnegie Mellon was, at least).
nbm 15y ago
People aren't forced to work nights and weekends during lockdown, although some teams may up their expectations for people to do that. I haven't been on a high-priority project for a lockdown, but I imagine it is possible that some go overboard. I also imagine it is likely that the guys who have good reasons to not stay late or work weekends also teach the guys that go overboard a thing or two much of the time. Working a few nights and weekends for a known short period of time is different from a death march, making it a habit, or having a culture that expects it all the time. Much like I imagine Sheryl does a few late nights in a row and an impacted weekend every once in a while to overcome some time-sensitive hurdles to the company's success. The message is that the company is going to make it easy to work on and focus on the particular high-priority projects you are involved in by increasing the rate and operating hours for shuttles and kitchens, and making it even more culturally acceptable (and even dutiful) to avoid distractions like meetings, lower-priority projects, and so forth. Obstacles to getting work done, whether during usual office hours (which are already not that usual) or not, are reduced or removed. For me, the lockdown concept gave me an opportunity to consider working on more important things than the things that just happened to be in my tasks list, my appointment calendar, what people in team meetings thought was important, and so forth. Lower-value meetings started happening less frequently or being indefinitely postponed. In terms of time, I think I ended up working less at the end of lockdown than I did before it started.

rollypolly 15y ago

In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week. The fact that it's illegal doesn't mean it's not happening.

njs12345 15y ago
It's certainly not illegal in the UK if the employee signs a waiver when hired: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029426 http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHour... (see "Opting out of the 48 hour week")
- bmj 15y ago
  Is this typical for, say, the software industry there? I wonder if it's the equivalent of non-competes and intellectual property agreements here: ubiquitous enough that most people don't even blink when they are part of an employment contract.
  - AlisdairO 15y ago
    In the UK it's fairly typical to work a 37.5 hour working week in the software industry, with 20-25 days vacation. I work at $BIGCORP and work approximately those hours, as do the vast majority of my coworkers (apart from at intermittent crunch periods). My experience in previous businesses was roughly the same, as is that of my friends in other companies - apart from a couple who work longer because they want to. This does not apply to the (much higher paid) work available in programming in the banking sector, where substantially longer work weeks are typical.
    - njs12345 15y ago
      You'll definitely get one for any finance job, even an internship. Interestingly, they can't compel you to sign, but if you don't sign, they make you jump through all kinds of hoops w.r.t reporting your hours and such and mire you in so much bureaucracy you can't get anything done.

bishnu 15y ago

Sheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30; she doesn't stop working at 5:30 [1]. In that same article it goes to great lengths to talk about how late she stays up working and how early she would start to ensure people didn't think she was a slacker. [1] http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg-can-leave-early-why-arent-you.html http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg...

deleted 15y ago
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rkudeshi 15y ago
I believe that was in reference to what she USED to do, to avoid the slacker stigma. Now she works less hours, proudly.

overshard 15y ago

What bothers me is that it matters how long someone works in a week. If you are getting payed for a 40 hour work week then you should only work 40 hours a week. If you are getting paid hourly (as I do) who cares as long as stuff is getting done. Some weeks I work 20 hours, some I work 60 it just depends on my workload and mood. If you want to work 40 hours a week and be done then go for it, good for you. If you want to work 60 hours a week, also good for you. The problem comes with you start judging other people by how long they work, just because someone goes home at 5 every day doesn't mean they don't care about their jobs...

w0utert 15y ago
^ this Hours worked must be one of the worst metrics for performance, productivity, efficiency or commitment. I don't know why people in some countries or cultures are so obsessed with how long they work, or how few days they take off. Or actually, maybe I do know why, but it has nothing to do with 'amount of work done' or 'quality of work'. I think that more often than not, the people consistently putting in the most hours are those who take the longest to finish stuff, and care the least about the quality of their output. Anyone can sit behind a desk 10 hours a day to impress the boss. IMO no metric used to assess performance or productivity should include the number of hours present in the office. Instead of 'hours worked this week' or 'number of days worked this year', the metric should be 'total number of hours to finish the job', preferably divided by a factor based on the 'amount of rework or support required afterwards' and/or multiplied by a factor based on the flexibility of the person doing the work, both in terms of availability as well as skill set. Of course some of these things are hard to track on a spreadsheet, so they are rarely used. Long story short: just try to do the best job you can in the most efficient way possible, without turning into a bean counter, just because that's the best way to impress your superior.
- MarlonPro 15y ago
  Great point! Getting things done in 40 or less hours a week is a great feat. Now, "being busy" for more than that amount of hours is not.
- kennu 15y ago

temphn 15y ago

Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130 This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. Lessons from Yishan Wong, Director of Engineering at Facebook: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-determine-if-you-are-ready-to-join-a-startup Working at a startup doesn't necessarily mean long hours, but it does mean that it's not the hours that count, it's the results. If you need to work 80 hours to get something done by next week, you will need to do it because otherwise the startup might die - in a large company, this might just result in some mild consequences. Startup life tends to go in bursts. You should be comfortable with this. Had Mark Zuckerberg left at 5pm in the middle of the news feed crunch, the company probably would have died before it was able to pay Sheryl Sandberg so much money to work 40 hours a week. Instead they coded 48 hours straight.

j_baker 15y ago
Well that was certainly nice of him. Did you have any evidence that Sandberg's strategy is wrong for her or even the majority of people in the tech industry, or were you under the impression that an anecdote from a completely unrelated incident years before would actually prove something?
wpietri 15y ago
I believe the difference is "normal" versus "emergency". My startup aims for a sane work-week, but if something caught on fire I would be there until the fire was put out. As long as that happens rarely, it's not a problem. And you keep it that way by carefully analyzing each fire and making sure that you solve the root causes.

mea36 15y ago

As a woman in a start up and indeed generally as a member of a start up, I find this recent uproar about Sheryl Sandberg quite frustrating. I'll admit that I didn't watch the interview that she just did. However, I did see her speak this past year at the Grace Hopper Conference. Yes, she goes home at 5.30 to eat with her kids, but in this digital age it doesn't mean she is done with work. She just uses technology to timeshift and work when it best fits into her life. She goes home so she can be with her kids while they are awake but she's still responding to emails and does work after her kids are asleep. This is the beauty of digital age. While I don't have kids, or a even significant other, I do, however, have a personal life that I refuse to sacrifice because I am in a start up. I'm sure many of you feel the same; this means I do work, I go out with my friends, come home and do more work. Maybe I wake up earlier then everyone else, work on weekends, etc. This is no different than what Sandberg does.

heretohelp 15y ago
Be productive, ignore the haters, do your thing.