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The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

120 points by robtherobber 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sublinear 1y ago
> Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work. This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place. Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it. The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  In my last job, I was paid hourly wages, but the work we were doing was piecework. They could have structured our pay around how many pieces we finished during a shift. It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve. However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time. But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one. Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them! But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized. So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    I'm kind of confused by your writing. So your argument is that you didn't have incentive to do a shit ton of work compared to others, but by your own admission, your work was subpar because of the amount you pushed out. Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process. Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?
  - azornathogron 1y ago
    Your own description of your work seems self-contradictory? You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things. This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description. It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      The KPIs weren't focused on speed at all; don't know how you came to that conclusion. Their KPIs were in-line with their spoken criteria and they were always calibrating for best outcomes. The only time speed or volume was at issue was when we had a backlog. Sometimes we would begin to miss deadlines/time frames and sometimes there was priority work to be picked up. And AFAIK, KPIs weren't looking at those as a negative. It was just one of those productivity issues we encountered in staffing vs. amount of work vs. deadlines. Basically my work was excellent by all objective criteria and I was receiving fantastic performance reviews. But I still had room for improvement, don't you see? Simply because of the high rate of speed, I could personally tell that it could've been better, more, nicer, with some TLC and some better pacing. That doesn't mean that anyone else noticed or cared. It was mostly my personal assessments of how I was doing. But they did drop hints -- once or twice, an issue was raised and my mentor said "It's easy to miss if you're going quickly lol". It was just a hint and hardly even criticism, just a reminder that slowing down wouldn't hurt. And it's true that the rewards weren't there. If I finished everything then everything was finished and sometimes I was forced to clock out without work to do. That was the drawback of hourly wages for, essentially, piecework. Slowing down was fraught with complications. I type 100wpm, my thoughts operate at a certain pace, and I would get into a groove like playing a video game. Would you slow down in a video game to do a better job? If I slowed down, would I do better or would the artificial pace cause trouble? I often tried playing ambient, tempo-less or downtempo music to slow my pace, but I would typically just find a rhythm and go with it, rather than artificially slow down. Honestly, due to physical issues and the whole WFH distraction, it was often difficult for me to stay at my desk for a stretch.
- DanielHB 1y ago
  > The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity. This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases. And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc). Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Bean counters want their cake and eat it too. I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)
- Bjartr 1y ago
  You've gotta have some kind of secret sauce if text or recordings produces the same or better output than real conversation. I haven't seen it happen, though I'd love it if I did.
  - sublinear 1y ago
    Text works best when everyone involved in the chat is on the same level of deeper understanding. You're correct that this has pushed some forms of management away from the discussion, and I'm saying that's a net productivity gain for most workplaces. It accelerates the discussion towards results instead of constant hand holding and other unproductive social pressures. Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.
  - guappa 1y ago
    Written text tends to eliminate all the backhanded insults because there's a record now :)
- pards 1y ago
  > The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it. Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago
    All of those problems you mention are infinitely worse when there is no record of the conversation.
    - arccy 1y ago
      or the "records" are in private channels you can't access
  - jjk166 1y ago
    Luckily people are capable of learning skills. Being so addicted to Gen-Z slang and internal acronyms that you are unable to effectively convey information to your colleagues isn't a disability to be accommodated.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  > Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.
  - sublinear 1y ago
    Where I work, we still log hours towards jira tasks and those end up in projects on timesheets somewhere in servicenow. I'm not saying that hours aren't relevant at all. I'm saying that tracking hours towards tasks is a totally separate concern that should be decoupled from the workday and individual time management in general. This is especially true if your employees are on salary and often on-call as well.
- wisty 1y ago
  This doesn't explain "Theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm. Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs). Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company. Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.
  - sublinear 1y ago
    > for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs) I think you'll find plenty of real world reasons if you listen to the experiences of employees and contractors.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company. This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests. Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Since most employees are now using LLMs for most tasks, we have a more standardized way now for tracking who is working, based on LLM usage. No need to vaguely measure “output”, which doesn’t give you realtime info until a task is delivered. This is why we are now pushing LLM tools across the entire org.
kleiba 1y ago
> An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks. For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break. Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
  - kleiba 1y ago
    For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.
    - mattkrause 1y ago
      Almost no tasks! There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
  > For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation. Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country): - Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...) - Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing). - Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory). I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.
tmckd 1y ago
Some of the pandemic increase in time worked may have been a net benefit to the folks working. A lot of people I know spent at least some of the time they otherwise would have spent commuting working remotely. And, since commuting sucks, ended up happier for it. Anecdotes aren’t data, but this pattern was very common among people I know.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  The business got more benefit. Harder to argue it is for the employees.
  - e1g 1y ago
    If the business got more benefit, they would be fighting to keep this setup - and none are.
    - cbogie 1y ago
      pesky evidence
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Is any of this based upon evidence? As best I can tell, the demand for RTO is entirely vibe bossing.
    - pipes 1y ago
      I think you are probably right, however it could just be that managers are paranoid.
    - coolcase 1y ago
      Businesses are not Austrian spherical rational actors. They are run by people with their own agendas that have much but not perfect alignment with the company.
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      The companies “fighting” against this stuff are mostly large and not necessarily aiming at the same target for “benefit” as one might think. On the whole, remote work gave workers more agency. That highlighted that the control that some layers of management weakened in some ways. It also highlights that poor processes are more easily exploited. Companies don’t vet their employees well where that is important, but not mandated by customer contracts… thus we’ve learned that many frauds are trivially accomplished if you never see people. On the flip, less remote may ultimately be in the employees interest. If you’re some high level JPMC employee making $500k from your ski cottage in Vermont… well let’s say your NYC salary doesn’t reflect the market, and if you can succeed in Vermont, you can probably be replaced by someone making $100k in Iowa, $50k in Latin America or less in Asia. The loudest voices on HN and other places about the awesomeness of remote work are really celebrating their success arbitrage… which always cuts both ways.
bix6 1y ago
I would like to see this after 8+ weeks as perhaps it tapered off once people adjusted?
- tomhow 1y ago
  I also have to wonder how much of the increase in that first few weeks/months of the pandemic was attributable to everyone having to work like crazy to figure out how the company/organisation can adapt to a global pandemic.
Koshima 1y ago
The remote work era exposed a strange paradox: while we saved time on commutes, we often ended up working longer. Maybe it’s because our calendars became too accessible, or perhaps the "out of sight, out of mind" fear kicked in for managers. Either way, the true cost of this shift is still playing out.
- lukashoff 1y ago
  The WFH shift also exposed the ones who have self discipline and the ones who are not. Nobody is asking you to go beyond the contracted hours. Inability to stop working is a fault of the person and not the mode of working. Agree that the managers fear kicked in so they start to pretend to do work for "visibility". However, that's a sign of a rotten culture and these people were most likely NOT productive in the first place and now they are being exposed therefore they have a need to over-compensate for it. There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.
  - willismichael 1y ago
    And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability. But that's what I want to hear more about!
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > But that's what I want to hear more about! My own anecdotal experience: I'm on the spectrum, albeit pretty high functioning, and diagnosed ADHD Inattentive type. WfH has really allowed me to excel in my work like I never have before, especially in the early days. Working in office is exhausting for me. I have a lot of tics/stims that I have to try and mask when around others, the lighting is usually horrible and distracting, open office plans or cubicles are a sensory nightmare. Just trying to mask alone is exhausting enough that I can't focus on work at all, and my performance suffers from it, and I get burned out really fast. Now, I get to be comfortable in my own skin at home. I have my office set up exactly how I want, I can wear whatever I want, and at my job there's no expectation of cameras on for meetings. One of the best benefits, for me, is almost everything is done via written communication now. I take very few phone calls, and outside of meetings, all communication is done over chat or email. There's no one to just barge into my workspace to ask a question, interrupting my focus, which would essentially ruin the entire day's of productivity for me. I also have a delayed circadian rhythm, and having to commute can be dangerous. There are many times that I just can't wake up enough in the morning to be alert enough to drive, even after a full night of restful sleep. I still have this problem, but with WfH I no longer have to drive, and there's some flexibility to start whenever I want as long as I'm on the first meeting of the day or there's no urgent tickets waiting for me (I'm not a dev, I'm a sysadmin). With in office work, I can ask for accommodations, but it's difficult and has a stigma to ask "I need my own office, with a door, with plenty of natural light, my own control of overhead lighting, and for people to not interrupt me. Oh and I need flexibility to be able to come in whenever I want within a 2 hour window because some mornings I just can't wake up enough to be safe driving." Lastly, there's no pressure to "fake work" or pretend to be productive beyond my own limits. Like one of the commenters earlier said, most people especially in knowledge work are probably only truly productive 4 to maybe 5 hours of the work day. I'm totally dead after about 4 hours of real work, so an 8 hour work day just doesn't make sense to me. When at home I can go do other things when I'm done with my work for the day, and just have alerts on my phone for tickets or calls/chat messages, I don't have to stay at my desk and pretend to work. So yeah, WfH has been a godsend for me and I couldn't ever go back to in office work. I have no ambitions for promotions or management, so I plan to stick with this job basically until I retire so long as they continue to allow WfH. If that doesn't pan out, not sure what I'll do. While everyone else was down about the COVID lockdowns, it was basically some of the best times of my life and I was the happiest I've been in a while. WfH, less crowds, less traffic, and grocery stores had sensory hours.
SirMaster 1y ago
I worked 40 hours before and I work 40 hours now. Can't say I have seen a change in my meetings either. I have like 2-3 a week on average.
- newAccount2025 1y ago
  Say you have a great boss without saying you have a great boss. :)
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Can’t be that great, he has 3 meetings a week.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  They understand that their findings don't apply to everyone in the world and it's implicitly understood that there will be exceptions. It can be discordant when you're the protagonist of your own reality and you see a headline that doesn't match your own experience but in the big picture it's very normal.
- thuanao 1y ago
  2-3 a week? I’m jealous. I’m just a programmer (or “IC senior software engineer” in corpo-speak) and I have 2-3 per day. Most days I only have about 3-4 hours after lunch to get any work done.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    I mean with no meetings, I have 4 hours after lunch to do work. I work 8-5 and generally take 12-1 for lunch. 4 hours before and 4 hours after.
blitzar 1y ago
I genuinely thought the meetings culture was out of control 10 years ago - it is way worse now. Management used to moan about sitting in meetings all day, I used to moan about it too because anytime I was in the meetings the first 20 minutes would be chit chat about the big game / their holiday plans / office gossip. > You're Right You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings But ... you are doing less work and more of your meetings are a complete waste of time.
davio 1y ago
One of my friends said his prior company (Fortune 50 size) had one of the big consulting companies come in for an assessment. The main takeaway was too much time spent in meetings. They banned afternoon meetings and put time spent in meetings as a KPI on performance reviews for managers (I think there was a 4hr daily maximum as a target)
- ctkhn 1y ago
  4h daily maximum meetings is still unreal. That's what I clock on my absolute worst days, most days it's just standup and an hour of backlog refinement
  - climb_stealth 1y ago
    Agreed. After 4 hours of meetings I'd mentally dead for at least the day, and there is no way there'd be any productive work left.
bluedino 1y ago
For some people. What's the average including the people who were running errands, walking their dogs, watching their kids, sleeping, etc during work hours?
- wiseowise 1y ago
  God forbid someone does something gasp necessary for life on work time. Having happy workers is, obviously, worse for the company than literal days of useless chit chats and coffee breaks.
  - bluedino 1y ago
    I think you're confusing that with the people that slacked off the entire time.
PaulRobinson 1y ago
I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work. The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work. I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it. If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.
- closeparen 1y ago
  Those 4-5 productive hours start for me after 6-8 hours riddled with Zoom calls, if not completely covered in them.
- wenc 1y ago
  > I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work. Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking. When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours. Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new. The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon) Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work. Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.
bachmeier 1y ago
I absolutely had a longer workday. But that wasn't what I hated about the first year of the pandemic. It's that I was doing more worthless things with my time: communicating by email, learning technology, handling administrative items related to the pandemic. None of these had value to the world. It was just a big tax on top of the stuff I was doing already, and it left me with less time to do things that had value.
nunez 1y ago
I felt this one personally. The four to six hours of 30/45/60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I'm actively participating or not. It's easier if you're a morning person, since you can do all of your "life stuff" before work. However, I'm not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I'm confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.) (I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I'll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the "free" time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.) Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I'm at customer sites. It feels much, much easier. For me, a big part of it is environment. When I'm home, I want to do "home" stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I'm in an "office", I'm in work mode. I'm locked in. It's much easier for me to focus on work things this way.
PeterStuer 1y ago
In the very early days, Java was pushed into the mainstream long before it was ready. This left a foul taste as management demanded we jumped on the bandwagon while the trenches filled with frustration over many bugs in the early JVM's and language implementations and missing quality in core features. It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it's maturity and capabilities at the time. It did not feel as quirky as C++'s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?). Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia's darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts. Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.
htk 1y ago
More emails and more meetings means workdays increased? Are they adjusting for the fact the in person you don't need as many emails and meetings and can just talk person to person?
rufasterisco 1y ago
Lovkbbbkbl itioiyk

120 points by robtherobber 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

> Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work. This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place. Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it. The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.

AStonesThrow 1y ago
In my last job, I was paid hourly wages, but the work we were doing was piecework. They could have structured our pay around how many pieces we finished during a shift. It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve. However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time. But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one. Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them! But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized. So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.
- Loughla 1y ago
  I'm kind of confused by your writing. So your argument is that you didn't have incentive to do a shit ton of work compared to others, but by your own admission, your work was subpar because of the amount you pushed out. Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process. Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?
- azornathogron 1y ago
  Your own description of your work seems self-contradictory? You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things. This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description. It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    The KPIs weren't focused on speed at all; don't know how you came to that conclusion. Their KPIs were in-line with their spoken criteria and they were always calibrating for best outcomes. The only time speed or volume was at issue was when we had a backlog. Sometimes we would begin to miss deadlines/time frames and sometimes there was priority work to be picked up. And AFAIK, KPIs weren't looking at those as a negative. It was just one of those productivity issues we encountered in staffing vs. amount of work vs. deadlines. Basically my work was excellent by all objective criteria and I was receiving fantastic performance reviews. But I still had room for improvement, don't you see? Simply because of the high rate of speed, I could personally tell that it could've been better, more, nicer, with some TLC and some better pacing. That doesn't mean that anyone else noticed or cared. It was mostly my personal assessments of how I was doing. But they did drop hints -- once or twice, an issue was raised and my mentor said "It's easy to miss if you're going quickly lol". It was just a hint and hardly even criticism, just a reminder that slowing down wouldn't hurt. And it's true that the rewards weren't there. If I finished everything then everything was finished and sometimes I was forced to clock out without work to do. That was the drawback of hourly wages for, essentially, piecework. Slowing down was fraught with complications. I type 100wpm, my thoughts operate at a certain pace, and I would get into a groove like playing a video game. Would you slow down in a video game to do a better job? If I slowed down, would I do better or would the artificial pace cause trouble? I often tried playing ambient, tempo-less or downtempo music to slow my pace, but I would typically just find a rhythm and go with it, rather than artificially slow down. Honestly, due to physical issues and the whole WFH distraction, it was often difficult for me to stay at my desk for a stretch.
DanielHB 1y ago
> The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity. This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases. And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc). Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.
wiseowise 1y ago
> Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Bean counters want their cake and eat it too. I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)
Bjartr 1y ago
You've gotta have some kind of secret sauce if text or recordings produces the same or better output than real conversation. I haven't seen it happen, though I'd love it if I did.
- sublinear 1y ago
  Text works best when everyone involved in the chat is on the same level of deeper understanding. You're correct that this has pushed some forms of management away from the discussion, and I'm saying that's a net productivity gain for most workplaces. It accelerates the discussion towards results instead of constant hand holding and other unproductive social pressures. Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.
- guappa 1y ago
  Written text tends to eliminate all the backhanded insults because there's a record now :)
pards 1y ago
> The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it. Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  All of those problems you mention are infinitely worse when there is no record of the conversation.
  - arccy 1y ago
    or the "records" are in private channels you can't access
- jjk166 1y ago
  Luckily people are capable of learning skills. Being so addicted to Gen-Z slang and internal acronyms that you are unable to effectively convey information to your colleagues isn't a disability to be accommodated.
tbrownaw 1y ago
> Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.
- sublinear 1y ago
  Where I work, we still log hours towards jira tasks and those end up in projects on timesheets somewhere in servicenow. I'm not saying that hours aren't relevant at all. I'm saying that tracking hours towards tasks is a totally separate concern that should be decoupled from the workday and individual time management in general. This is especially true if your employees are on salary and often on-call as well.
wisty 1y ago
This doesn't explain "Theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm. Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs). Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company. Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.
- sublinear 1y ago
  > for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs) I think you'll find plenty of real world reasons if you listen to the experiences of employees and contractors.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company. This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests. Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.
deadbabe 1y ago
Since most employees are now using LLMs for most tasks, we have a more standardized way now for tracking who is working, based on LLM usage. No need to vaguely measure “output”, which doesn’t give you realtime info until a task is delivered. This is why we are now pushing LLM tools across the entire org.

kleiba 1y ago

> An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks. For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.

trollbridge 1y ago
I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break. Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
- kleiba 1y ago
  For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.
  - mattkrause 1y ago
    Almost no tasks! There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.
Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
> For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation. Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country): - Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...) - Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing). - Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory). I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.

tmckd 1y ago

Some of the pandemic increase in time worked may have been a net benefit to the folks working. A lot of people I know spent at least some of the time they otherwise would have spent commuting working remotely. And, since commuting sucks, ended up happier for it. Anecdotes aren’t data, but this pattern was very common among people I know.

philipwhiuk 1y ago
The business got more benefit. Harder to argue it is for the employees.
- e1g 1y ago
  If the business got more benefit, they would be fighting to keep this setup - and none are.
  - cbogie 1y ago
    pesky evidence
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      Is any of this based upon evidence? As best I can tell, the demand for RTO is entirely vibe bossing.
  - pipes 1y ago
    I think you are probably right, however it could just be that managers are paranoid.
  - coolcase 1y ago
    Businesses are not Austrian spherical rational actors. They are run by people with their own agendas that have much but not perfect alignment with the company.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    The companies “fighting” against this stuff are mostly large and not necessarily aiming at the same target for “benefit” as one might think. On the whole, remote work gave workers more agency. That highlighted that the control that some layers of management weakened in some ways. It also highlights that poor processes are more easily exploited. Companies don’t vet their employees well where that is important, but not mandated by customer contracts… thus we’ve learned that many frauds are trivially accomplished if you never see people. On the flip, less remote may ultimately be in the employees interest. If you’re some high level JPMC employee making $500k from your ski cottage in Vermont… well let’s say your NYC salary doesn’t reflect the market, and if you can succeed in Vermont, you can probably be replaced by someone making $100k in Iowa, $50k in Latin America or less in Asia. The loudest voices on HN and other places about the awesomeness of remote work are really celebrating their success arbitrage… which always cuts both ways.

bix6 1y ago

I would like to see this after 8+ weeks as perhaps it tapered off once people adjusted?

tomhow 1y ago
I also have to wonder how much of the increase in that first few weeks/months of the pandemic was attributable to everyone having to work like crazy to figure out how the company/organisation can adapt to a global pandemic.

Koshima 1y ago

The remote work era exposed a strange paradox: while we saved time on commutes, we often ended up working longer. Maybe it’s because our calendars became too accessible, or perhaps the "out of sight, out of mind" fear kicked in for managers. Either way, the true cost of this shift is still playing out.

lukashoff 1y ago
The WFH shift also exposed the ones who have self discipline and the ones who are not. Nobody is asking you to go beyond the contracted hours. Inability to stop working is a fault of the person and not the mode of working. Agree that the managers fear kicked in so they start to pretend to do work for "visibility". However, that's a sign of a rotten culture and these people were most likely NOT productive in the first place and now they are being exposed therefore they have a need to over-compensate for it. There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.
- willismichael 1y ago
  And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability. But that's what I want to hear more about!
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > But that's what I want to hear more about! My own anecdotal experience: I'm on the spectrum, albeit pretty high functioning, and diagnosed ADHD Inattentive type. WfH has really allowed me to excel in my work like I never have before, especially in the early days. Working in office is exhausting for me. I have a lot of tics/stims that I have to try and mask when around others, the lighting is usually horrible and distracting, open office plans or cubicles are a sensory nightmare. Just trying to mask alone is exhausting enough that I can't focus on work at all, and my performance suffers from it, and I get burned out really fast. Now, I get to be comfortable in my own skin at home. I have my office set up exactly how I want, I can wear whatever I want, and at my job there's no expectation of cameras on for meetings. One of the best benefits, for me, is almost everything is done via written communication now. I take very few phone calls, and outside of meetings, all communication is done over chat or email. There's no one to just barge into my workspace to ask a question, interrupting my focus, which would essentially ruin the entire day's of productivity for me. I also have a delayed circadian rhythm, and having to commute can be dangerous. There are many times that I just can't wake up enough in the morning to be alert enough to drive, even after a full night of restful sleep. I still have this problem, but with WfH I no longer have to drive, and there's some flexibility to start whenever I want as long as I'm on the first meeting of the day or there's no urgent tickets waiting for me (I'm not a dev, I'm a sysadmin). With in office work, I can ask for accommodations, but it's difficult and has a stigma to ask "I need my own office, with a door, with plenty of natural light, my own control of overhead lighting, and for people to not interrupt me. Oh and I need flexibility to be able to come in whenever I want within a 2 hour window because some mornings I just can't wake up enough to be safe driving." Lastly, there's no pressure to "fake work" or pretend to be productive beyond my own limits. Like one of the commenters earlier said, most people especially in knowledge work are probably only truly productive 4 to maybe 5 hours of the work day. I'm totally dead after about 4 hours of real work, so an 8 hour work day just doesn't make sense to me. When at home I can go do other things when I'm done with my work for the day, and just have alerts on my phone for tickets or calls/chat messages, I don't have to stay at my desk and pretend to work. So yeah, WfH has been a godsend for me and I couldn't ever go back to in office work. I have no ambitions for promotions or management, so I plan to stick with this job basically until I retire so long as they continue to allow WfH. If that doesn't pan out, not sure what I'll do. While everyone else was down about the COVID lockdowns, it was basically some of the best times of my life and I was the happiest I've been in a while. WfH, less crowds, less traffic, and grocery stores had sensory hours.

SirMaster 1y ago

I worked 40 hours before and I work 40 hours now. Can't say I have seen a change in my meetings either. I have like 2-3 a week on average.

newAccount2025 1y ago
Say you have a great boss without saying you have a great boss. :)
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Can’t be that great, he has 3 meetings a week.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
They understand that their findings don't apply to everyone in the world and it's implicitly understood that there will be exceptions. It can be discordant when you're the protagonist of your own reality and you see a headline that doesn't match your own experience but in the big picture it's very normal.
thuanao 1y ago
2-3 a week? I’m jealous. I’m just a programmer (or “IC senior software engineer” in corpo-speak) and I have 2-3 per day. Most days I only have about 3-4 hours after lunch to get any work done.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  I mean with no meetings, I have 4 hours after lunch to do work. I work 8-5 and generally take 12-1 for lunch. 4 hours before and 4 hours after.

blitzar 1y ago

I genuinely thought the meetings culture was out of control 10 years ago - it is way worse now. Management used to moan about sitting in meetings all day, I used to moan about it too because anytime I was in the meetings the first 20 minutes would be chit chat about the big game / their holiday plans / office gossip. > You're Right You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings But ... you are doing less work and more of your meetings are a complete waste of time.

davio 1y ago

One of my friends said his prior company (Fortune 50 size) had one of the big consulting companies come in for an assessment. The main takeaway was too much time spent in meetings. They banned afternoon meetings and put time spent in meetings as a KPI on performance reviews for managers (I think there was a 4hr daily maximum as a target)

ctkhn 1y ago
4h daily maximum meetings is still unreal. That's what I clock on my absolute worst days, most days it's just standup and an hour of backlog refinement
- climb_stealth 1y ago
  Agreed. After 4 hours of meetings I'd mentally dead for at least the day, and there is no way there'd be any productive work left.

bluedino 1y ago

For some people. What's the average including the people who were running errands, walking their dogs, watching their kids, sleeping, etc during work hours?

wiseowise 1y ago
God forbid someone does something gasp necessary for life on work time. Having happy workers is, obviously, worse for the company than literal days of useless chit chats and coffee breaks.
- bluedino 1y ago
  I think you're confusing that with the people that slacked off the entire time.

PaulRobinson 1y ago

I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work. The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work. I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it. If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.

closeparen 1y ago
Those 4-5 productive hours start for me after 6-8 hours riddled with Zoom calls, if not completely covered in them.
wenc 1y ago
> I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work. Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking. When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours. Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new. The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon) Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work. Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.

bachmeier 1y ago

I absolutely had a longer workday. But that wasn't what I hated about the first year of the pandemic. It's that I was doing more worthless things with my time: communicating by email, learning technology, handling administrative items related to the pandemic. None of these had value to the world. It was just a big tax on top of the stuff I was doing already, and it left me with less time to do things that had value.

nunez 1y ago

I felt this one personally. The four to six hours of 30/45/60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I'm actively participating or not. It's easier if you're a morning person, since you can do all of your "life stuff" before work. However, I'm not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I'm confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.) (I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I'll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the "free" time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.) Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I'm at customer sites. It feels much, much easier. For me, a big part of it is environment. When I'm home, I want to do "home" stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I'm in an "office", I'm in work mode. I'm locked in. It's much easier for me to focus on work things this way.

PeterStuer 1y ago

In the very early days, Java was pushed into the mainstream long before it was ready. This left a foul taste as management demanded we jumped on the bandwagon while the trenches filled with frustration over many bugs in the early JVM's and language implementations and missing quality in core features. It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it's maturity and capabilities at the time. It did not feel as quirky as C++'s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?). Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia's darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts. Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.

htk 1y ago

More emails and more meetings means workdays increased? Are they adjusting for the fact the in person you don't need as many emails and meetings and can just talk person to person?

rufasterisco 1y ago

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