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> They can't work for more than 10 hours a day What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than
by dns_snek 2y ago
> They can't work for more than 10 hours a day
What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.
You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"
As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.
If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.
- constantcrying 2y ago>What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? Hypothetically there could be a very important deadline to meet. I absolutely do not believe that you can consistently do high quality mental work for 8+ hours a day, but certainly I have worked productively for 10+ hours in a single day on occasion, that was during University though. To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.
- dns_snek 2y agoI agree it's possible to work 10+ hours on occasion. I quickly looked up German laws regarding working hours, and it seems like the legal weekly maximum is 60h (6x 10h per day) which should cover very occasional crunch time to meet deadlines (that's 50% more than the average work week), but long-term average over 6 months must not exceed 48h/week, which seems sensible. > To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product. I understand, though I don't believe that working long hours is a productive use of anyone's time over time periods longer than a few weeks. From my personal experience working longer than ~8h impacts both concentration and quality, which decimate efficiency of any subsequent hours worked (more bugs then mean more time needed to fix these bugs, which just adds to the crunch). After a while these side-effects begin to bleed into the next workday which ultimately nullifies the benefits of longer hours.
- constantcrying 2y agoI don't know what you are arguing. Do you believe that there will never be a situation where in a startup employers can spend more than 10+ hours of productive work in a day? I don't know why you are talking as if I didn't completely agree, and already said so, that demand 8+ hours of high quality mental work is counterproductive over long periods of time. My point remains that German labor laws make startups very hard to do. Not that I believe that you should work 10 hours a day over months, but in a startup there might very well be a situation where you can spend 12 hours effectively, which would be a violation of labor laws.
- sashakryzh 2y ago> What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? The government shouldn't regulate the work hours in the first place.