6 ms·

Why Going Home at 5:30 Brings in Top Talent

44 points by tablet 13y ago

shaggyfrog 13y ago
> Like many super-successful execs, he goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening. This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here, if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful exec" that he does extra hours?
- kamaal 13y ago
  To be very honest with you, if you are claiming you did some thing spectacular working 9 hours/day in software. You are either really a super developer or you are cheating some way.
  - dscrd 13y ago
    9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker. So if you're working over 6 hours/day, you are most probably wasting your employer's time and your own life. Infrequent longer streches of work are a different thing, of course, they work, but they need to be countered by vacation time which brings the average to about 5-6 hours /day anyway.
    - kamaal 13y ago
      >>9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker. May be, but nearly every successful person I know falls into two basic categories. 1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating. 2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day. I haven't seen any exceptions to these scenarios. You can point factory assembly era type studies, where incentives for both succeeding and failing are none. The rewards are very linear to efforts. And you get only incremental hourly income for more effort. Obviously in such cases productivity will fall with extra working hours. Because motivation falls, the person begins to associate working extra with slavery and being paid bones for slogging to make somebody else rich. But if the reward and work relationship is non-linear. And you get good enough money for taking a risks and working real hard. The motivation peaks and corresponding work done and profit from that rise.
      - michaelochurch 13y ago
        1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating. OK, lesson time. There are people who make corporate social climbing a full-time job. Their code (if there is any) isn't great. They don't have real software accomplishments. Yet they rise. It has nothing to do with what they build, because they don't build anything. They take a lot of credit and endure (or call) a lot of meetings. That's a fundamentally different game from building software. 2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day. You don't have to work 70-hour weeks to make things that people want.
    - ceoloide 13y ago
      Can you point me to specific case studies or research papers? I think they would be an interesting read. Many thanks in advance!
  - PakG1 13y ago
    or you are cheating some way I was thinking how can anyone cheat doing their job to become better? And then I remembered the guy who outsourced his job to China so that he could look at cat pictures all day, and came to be known as his company's best expert on many technologies. :)
  - qwerta 13y ago
    Many great open-source projects were build over evenings with just 2 or 3 hours per day. Also it depends on type of work. Most people could work on CRUD websites for 16 hours a day. But some work require laser sharp concentration and drain daily energy in half hour. And working tired is about as smart as driving drunk. What could possibly happen? :-)
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    On serious programming, 5-6 hours seems to be an upper limit for the average. That's not to say that you can't do a 12-hour day occasionally, but you'll tire out faster and need more light weeks. To me, the best schedule seems to be 11 3-hour blocks (contiguous, no interruptions) over 5.5 days. For startup founders it's a bit different because there's variation in workload. Code isn't the only thing they do. They also have to meet with investors, manage people, set priorities, and network. With that additional variation, you can more easily get to a 70+ hour week and not burn out because even though you're pushing yourself to the limit of what most people can handle in terms of work and stress, you're doing different kinds of work. It's still exhausting, but it's less exhausting than doing the same kind of work for 70 hours. Look, I enjoy the hell out of programming. It is a lot of fun. And I'm good at it. I've been doing it for long enough to know that I can't get 3,500 hours per year of quality code. There are people who claim to be different, but for every case of that where I've had the "privilege" of seeing his or her work, I've found that person not to be different. Now, I have to say this bluntly: you're just wrong on one thing. The idea that you can't have real achievements without long hours is completely incorrect. With the right insights and exposure, you can. I'm not saying it's easy, and it typically comes only after several years of continuous hard work, but what's appealing about software is that often you can save a company millions with under a hundred hours of work. (Well, actually, that's because of the thousands of hours the person spent learning before that point, but the nice thing about programming is the acceleration of value creation. Once you learn more stuff, you get to a point where you can reliably add value to such degrees.)
victorology 13y ago
Would be interested to know how many people leave work at 5:30 but do extra work after hours.
- Peroni 13y ago
  Prior to accepting the role I'm currently in I had a prerequisite that I get to finish at 4.30PM on the button every day without fear of reprisal as it enables me to spend at least an hour with my son every evening before he goes to sleep. Once he's down I usually get one or two more hours of work in before I spend quality time with my wife. I have a lot of respect for people who work 60/70/80 hours a week however to some (myself included), quality time with my family is infinitely more valuable than anything any employer could ever offer.
- kamaal 13y ago
  A lot, In my case its because traffic here in Bangalore gets too chaotic after 6. If you are leaving after 6, till 8 its foolishness. There are times when people who leave at 7 and 9 reach home at the same time. Given this, if your company has a set up where you can log in to VPN and get the work done. Rather leave at 5:30 reach home early and get the job done, than leave at 7 and spend next 2 hours just traveling. Having said this- 'working' from home, requires a lot of discipline and being brutally honest with your own self about you productivity and impact of your work. Most importantly you need to get stuff done. From an execs perspective, Big part of their work is designating work and sending emails. You don't need to be at office just to push Blackberry buttons.
- caseyohara 13y ago
  I'm interested in this as well. Quite a few people I know that have flexible hours tend to split their work day one way or another: 9-5 at the office + a few hours in the evening at home, 6-9 at home in the morning + 9-3 at the office, etc. There are so many permutations, I wonder if a poll would yield anything interesting.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  It depends where in the globe you are. Here in Germany people even leave work at 4:30 pm.
henrik_w 13y ago
Working more than 40 hours a week doesn't mean you are more productive. See "Bring back the 40-hour work week" http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
- kamaal 13y ago
  Unfortunately there are tons of examples which say otherwise. Nearly every start up is an example of this. Working a lot, gets a lot of work done. Ofcourse you need rest and recovery time to time. But on an average a guy who does 16 hours/day will inevitable achieve more than somebody who does 8 hours/day. Don't look too surprised if that happens.
  - henrik_w 13y ago
    Are they successful because they work 16 hours/day, or despite working 16 hours/day?
    - Jgrubb 13y ago
      Maybe they work 16 hours a day because they are successful.
  - yarrel 13y ago
    Working pst 8 hours a day adds bugs that you then have to work more hours to fix. This feels like a lot of work because it is. But it's not "achieving more".
  - shaggyfrog 13y ago
    > Nearly every start up is an example of this. And what is the percentage of startups that "fail"? Working really hard on a bad idea doesn't make it get any better. Garbage in, garbage out. I suspect that the number of hours worked per week isn't a strong indicator of either success or failure.
- dman 13y ago
  Would be interesting to interview nobel laureates and see what fraction of them are working 40 hours a week.
rejschaap 13y ago
"[H]e goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening." So basically he gets a small break to have dinner and then goes back to work. That's not really what the title is suggesting. Not sure what the article is trying to suggest. Eat your veggies?
drorweiss 13y ago
With 2 young daughters, for me it's usually: 9-18:00 working 18:30-21:00 dinner+bath+bedtime story 21:00-22:00 ~ free time 22:00 - 00:30 - second shift @work (from home)
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  Eleven and a half hours a day is a lot of time. Are you an employee or a business owner?
  - drorweiss 13y ago
    Startup founder :)
- yitchelle 13y ago
  I have seen this type schedules from many startup folks, and I have tried to do something similar for myself. Now, my family consists of me, wife and two kids. As I was kept being reminded, my poor wife keeps missing out some of my time. The winners of my time are my kids as I did not spent enough quality time with her. However, my point is to make time for your significant other. Don't ever never forget that they are also part of your family!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nugget 13y ago
In my experience top talent is available pretty much 24/7. Not necessarily in the office, but "always on". In order to really climb up the ladder, they incorporate work into almost every part of their lives, and most of them seem to enjoy it.
- blindhippo 13y ago
  Bit of a misnomer - talent is not directly tied to hours spent working, especially in knowledge industries. This simple, basic fact escapes most of our industry managers who still use management practices developed a century ago to manage steel mills. So yes, we may be "always on" but that means inspiration and thought could come at any time.
tablet 13y ago
We had 40-hrs work week rule from day 1 (well, nobody followed it in the beginning though). Now we have 50 people on board and it is really important to maintain a good balance to keep energy. So we have 4 working days and 1 day (Friday) dedicated to learning and personal projects. We have no overtimes for years. It is an incredibly rare event.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I'm a believer in the 3-hour work-day. "4-hour work week" is impractical for most jobs. 40 hours is a reasonable average, but expecting anyone to put in an 8-10 hour contiguous block (that often ends up being ~11, including commute) is inhumane. Why, on the one 55-degree, sunny day in January that (by the weather's lack of concern for us) lands on a Tuesday, should people be stuck inside during that four hours of nice weather? At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working 9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still working at a sustainable pace. However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software-- and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave the office before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than 15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking to learn more. I'd also have: * an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.) * 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.
- randallsquared 13y ago
  > an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Ah, yes, the "nobody ever really wants to be alone" supposition. Having lunch by myself, or at least in a non-work context, breaks the day into two "at-work" chunks, allowing me to start semi-fresh in the afternoon. Most days I need that break from other people for a while, and would certainly not want to work someplace that tried to take that respite away.
blindhippo 13y ago
How sad is it that this article needs to exist? It boils down to one final sentence: "The Takeaway: If you create a company that encourages people to lead full lives, you can land a full roster of talent." Or translated: treat people as... PEOPLE and you can hire people! Are management drones really that incompetent that they need this explained to them? (rhetorical - clearly the answer is yes)
- potatolicious 13y ago
  It's unfair to blame this on management drones - this propensity for mindless overwork is a key component of geek culture. We brought this upon ourselves, in many ways, though unscrupulous companies certainly have taken advantage of it. How many other fields and subcultures glorify and celebrate caffeine-fueled binges and lack of sleep? How many subcultures form competitions around how horribly you can abuse your body for nerd points? Hell, as a nerdy kid growing up, how many of your fellow nerds shunned you for daring to branch out and do non-nerdy things on the side? For a bunch of ostracized people we sure as hell do a lot of it on our own. This translates not just to big companies but to founders too. There is a pernicious perception that if you're not mindlessly devoted at all hours of the day (waking or otherwise) to your startup/work that you are unworthy. The geek subculture has never really known moderation. It's sad that this article needs to exist, but bad management is really only the surface. This goes pretty deep.
hawkharris 13y ago
Normally multimedia adds to an article, but I thought the formatting in this story was distracting. It broke up the flow of reading, especially because the text was short and the TL;DR explanations were as long as the text itself.
cheez 13y ago
> I was able to get her because she was four months pregnant I love that this is the thing that sold her on his company. Let's be honest though, the vast majority of businesses are hard, tedious work. Not many founders are smart enough to work smart and so they just work hard. This is why pregnant women get treated as untouchables and it's not their fault, it is the business's fault for being unable to develop the right model. The knee-jerk reaction by feminists would be to legislate this away but you are more or less asking for businesses to go out of business by hiring employees that are overpaid relative to their coworkers. Productivity cannot be provided by JUST the employee, the business needs to help as well and most do not.

44 points by tablet 13y ago

> Like many super-successful execs, he goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening. This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here, if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful exec" that he does extra hours?

kamaal 13y ago
To be very honest with you, if you are claiming you did some thing spectacular working 9 hours/day in software. You are either really a super developer or you are cheating some way.
- dscrd 13y ago
  9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker. So if you're working over 6 hours/day, you are most probably wasting your employer's time and your own life. Infrequent longer streches of work are a different thing, of course, they work, but they need to be countered by vacation time which brings the average to about 5-6 hours /day anyway.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    >>9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker. May be, but nearly every successful person I know falls into two basic categories. 1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating. 2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day. I haven't seen any exceptions to these scenarios. You can point factory assembly era type studies, where incentives for both succeeding and failing are none. The rewards are very linear to efforts. And you get only incremental hourly income for more effort. Obviously in such cases productivity will fall with extra working hours. Because motivation falls, the person begins to associate working extra with slavery and being paid bones for slogging to make somebody else rich. But if the reward and work relationship is non-linear. And you get good enough money for taking a risks and working real hard. The motivation peaks and corresponding work done and profit from that rise.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating. OK, lesson time. There are people who make corporate social climbing a full-time job. Their code (if there is any) isn't great. They don't have real software accomplishments. Yet they rise. It has nothing to do with what they build, because they don't build anything. They take a lot of credit and endure (or call) a lot of meetings. That's a fundamentally different game from building software. 2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day. You don't have to work 70-hour weeks to make things that people want.
  - ceoloide 13y ago
    Can you point me to specific case studies or research papers? I think they would be an interesting read. Many thanks in advance!
- PakG1 13y ago
  or you are cheating some way I was thinking how can anyone cheat doing their job to become better? And then I remembered the guy who outsourced his job to China so that he could look at cat pictures all day, and came to be known as his company's best expert on many technologies. :)
- qwerta 13y ago
  Many great open-source projects were build over evenings with just 2 or 3 hours per day. Also it depends on type of work. Most people could work on CRUD websites for 16 hours a day. But some work require laser sharp concentration and drain daily energy in half hour. And working tired is about as smart as driving drunk. What could possibly happen? :-)
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  On serious programming, 5-6 hours seems to be an upper limit for the average. That's not to say that you can't do a 12-hour day occasionally, but you'll tire out faster and need more light weeks. To me, the best schedule seems to be 11 3-hour blocks (contiguous, no interruptions) over 5.5 days. For startup founders it's a bit different because there's variation in workload. Code isn't the only thing they do. They also have to meet with investors, manage people, set priorities, and network. With that additional variation, you can more easily get to a 70+ hour week and not burn out because even though you're pushing yourself to the limit of what most people can handle in terms of work and stress, you're doing different kinds of work. It's still exhausting, but it's less exhausting than doing the same kind of work for 70 hours. Look, I enjoy the hell out of programming. It is a lot of fun. And I'm good at it. I've been doing it for long enough to know that I can't get 3,500 hours per year of quality code. There are people who claim to be different, but for every case of that where I've had the "privilege" of seeing his or her work, I've found that person not to be different. Now, I have to say this bluntly: you're just wrong on one thing. The idea that you can't have real achievements without long hours is completely incorrect. With the right insights and exposure, you can. I'm not saying it's easy, and it typically comes only after several years of continuous hard work, but what's appealing about software is that often you can save a company millions with under a hundred hours of work. (Well, actually, that's because of the thousands of hours the person spent learning before that point, but the nice thing about programming is the acceleration of value creation. Once you learn more stuff, you get to a point where you can reliably add value to such degrees.)

victorology 13y ago

Would be interested to know how many people leave work at 5:30 but do extra work after hours.

Peroni 13y ago
Prior to accepting the role I'm currently in I had a prerequisite that I get to finish at 4.30PM on the button every day without fear of reprisal as it enables me to spend at least an hour with my son every evening before he goes to sleep. Once he's down I usually get one or two more hours of work in before I spend quality time with my wife. I have a lot of respect for people who work 60/70/80 hours a week however to some (myself included), quality time with my family is infinitely more valuable than anything any employer could ever offer.
kamaal 13y ago
A lot, In my case its because traffic here in Bangalore gets too chaotic after 6. If you are leaving after 6, till 8 its foolishness. There are times when people who leave at 7 and 9 reach home at the same time. Given this, if your company has a set up where you can log in to VPN and get the work done. Rather leave at 5:30 reach home early and get the job done, than leave at 7 and spend next 2 hours just traveling. Having said this- 'working' from home, requires a lot of discipline and being brutally honest with your own self about you productivity and impact of your work. Most importantly you need to get stuff done. From an execs perspective, Big part of their work is designating work and sending emails. You don't need to be at office just to push Blackberry buttons.
caseyohara 13y ago
I'm interested in this as well. Quite a few people I know that have flexible hours tend to split their work day one way or another: 9-5 at the office + a few hours in the evening at home, 6-9 at home in the morning + 9-3 at the office, etc. There are so many permutations, I wonder if a poll would yield anything interesting.
pjmlp 13y ago
It depends where in the globe you are. Here in Germany people even leave work at 4:30 pm.

henrik_w 13y ago

Working more than 40 hours a week doesn't mean you are more productive. See "Bring back the 40-hour work week" http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

kamaal 13y ago
Unfortunately there are tons of examples which say otherwise. Nearly every start up is an example of this. Working a lot, gets a lot of work done. Ofcourse you need rest and recovery time to time. But on an average a guy who does 16 hours/day will inevitable achieve more than somebody who does 8 hours/day. Don't look too surprised if that happens.
- henrik_w 13y ago
  Are they successful because they work 16 hours/day, or despite working 16 hours/day?
  - Jgrubb 13y ago
    Maybe they work 16 hours a day because they are successful.
- yarrel 13y ago
  Working pst 8 hours a day adds bugs that you then have to work more hours to fix. This feels like a lot of work because it is. But it's not "achieving more".
- shaggyfrog 13y ago
  > Nearly every start up is an example of this. And what is the percentage of startups that "fail"? Working really hard on a bad idea doesn't make it get any better. Garbage in, garbage out. I suspect that the number of hours worked per week isn't a strong indicator of either success or failure.
dman 13y ago
Would be interesting to interview nobel laureates and see what fraction of them are working 40 hours a week.

rejschaap 13y ago

"[H]e goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening." So basically he gets a small break to have dinner and then goes back to work. That's not really what the title is suggesting. Not sure what the article is trying to suggest. Eat your veggies?

drorweiss 13y ago

With 2 young daughters, for me it's usually: 9-18:00 working 18:30-21:00 dinner+bath+bedtime story 21:00-22:00 ~ free time 22:00 - 00:30 - second shift @work (from home)

andyjohnson0 13y ago
Eleven and a half hours a day is a lot of time. Are you an employee or a business owner?
- drorweiss 13y ago
  Startup founder :)
yitchelle 13y ago
I have seen this type schedules from many startup folks, and I have tried to do something similar for myself. Now, my family consists of me, wife and two kids. As I was kept being reminded, my poor wife keeps missing out some of my time. The winners of my time are my kids as I did not spent enough quality time with her. However, my point is to make time for your significant other. Don't ever never forget that they are also part of your family!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nugget 13y ago

In my experience top talent is available pretty much 24/7. Not necessarily in the office, but "always on". In order to really climb up the ladder, they incorporate work into almost every part of their lives, and most of them seem to enjoy it.

blindhippo 13y ago
Bit of a misnomer - talent is not directly tied to hours spent working, especially in knowledge industries. This simple, basic fact escapes most of our industry managers who still use management practices developed a century ago to manage steel mills. So yes, we may be "always on" but that means inspiration and thought could come at any time.

tablet 13y ago

We had 40-hrs work week rule from day 1 (well, nobody followed it in the beginning though). Now we have 50 people on board and it is really important to maintain a good balance to keep energy. So we have 4 working days and 1 day (Friday) dedicated to learning and personal projects. We have no overtimes for years. It is an incredibly rare event.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I'm a believer in the 3-hour work-day. "4-hour work week" is impractical for most jobs. 40 hours is a reasonable average, but expecting anyone to put in an 8-10 hour contiguous block (that often ends up being ~11, including commute) is inhumane. Why, on the one 55-degree, sunny day in January that (by the weather's lack of concern for us) lands on a Tuesday, should people be stuck inside during that four hours of nice weather? At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working 9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still working at a sustainable pace. However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software-- and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave the office before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than 15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking to learn more. I'd also have: * an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.) * 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.

randallsquared 13y ago
> an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Ah, yes, the "nobody ever really wants to be alone" supposition. Having lunch by myself, or at least in a non-work context, breaks the day into two "at-work" chunks, allowing me to start semi-fresh in the afternoon. Most days I need that break from other people for a while, and would certainly not want to work someplace that tried to take that respite away.

blindhippo 13y ago

How sad is it that this article needs to exist? It boils down to one final sentence: "The Takeaway: If you create a company that encourages people to lead full lives, you can land a full roster of talent." Or translated: treat people as... PEOPLE and you can hire people! Are management drones really that incompetent that they need this explained to them? (rhetorical - clearly the answer is yes)

potatolicious 13y ago
It's unfair to blame this on management drones - this propensity for mindless overwork is a key component of geek culture. We brought this upon ourselves, in many ways, though unscrupulous companies certainly have taken advantage of it. How many other fields and subcultures glorify and celebrate caffeine-fueled binges and lack of sleep? How many subcultures form competitions around how horribly you can abuse your body for nerd points? Hell, as a nerdy kid growing up, how many of your fellow nerds shunned you for daring to branch out and do non-nerdy things on the side? For a bunch of ostracized people we sure as hell do a lot of it on our own. This translates not just to big companies but to founders too. There is a pernicious perception that if you're not mindlessly devoted at all hours of the day (waking or otherwise) to your startup/work that you are unworthy. The geek subculture has never really known moderation. It's sad that this article needs to exist, but bad management is really only the surface. This goes pretty deep.

hawkharris 13y ago

Normally multimedia adds to an article, but I thought the formatting in this story was distracting. It broke up the flow of reading, especially because the text was short and the TL;DR explanations were as long as the text itself.

cheez 13y ago

> I was able to get her because she was four months pregnant I love that this is the thing that sold her on his company. Let's be honest though, the vast majority of businesses are hard, tedious work. Not many founders are smart enough to work smart and so they just work hard. This is why pregnant women get treated as untouchables and it's not their fault, it is the business's fault for being unable to develop the right model. The knee-jerk reaction by feminists would be to legislate this away but you are more or less asking for businesses to go out of business by hiring employees that are overpaid relative to their coworkers. Productivity cannot be provided by JUST the employee, the business needs to help as well and most do not.