17 ms·

What Long Hours Really Mean

220 points by johnjlocke 13y ago

gruseom 13y ago
This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie. If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Pay is only one reason for work. If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument. I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      Well, sure -- I acknowledged more intangible benefits in passing -- but the poster wanted an objective way to measure it, so I gave them one. shrug
      - gruseom 13y ago
        You gave a way of measuring something else.
  - oflordal 13y ago
    Most large companies will grade you based on your work adjusting bonus and the amount of stock you recive. That way there is at least some monetary incetive for it as well.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      Working extra hours with that in mind would only be wise if you could accurately predict the reward. It would be a rude surprise if you worked extra hard all year only to hear "Sorry, no performance bonuses this year, our CEOs decided they weren't earning enough."
  - throwaway9848 13y ago
    Yeah, and if you're in a startup and you have a significant equity position then you are not working for free, you are directly monetarily motivated. Also, people act to maximize their utility, not necessarily compensation. The act of working hard and hitting deadlines is a form of compensation in itself. Finally, lots of people work a lazy 8 hours (with lots of time spent on the phone, Facebook, personal email) and need the extra hours to accomplish 8 hours worth of real work.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      Your last example is kind of irrelevant, because if you're honest with yourself, you're not counting the not-work hours.
      - throwaway9848 13y ago
        That's a fair point with your qualifier. I think a lot of people are not honest with themselves about this, though.
    - brianmcconnell 13y ago
      Ah! The equity position as fake compensation. Unfortunately for the worker beeze, said "equity" usually turns out to be worthless in a exit, except in unicorn situations (Facebook, etc). The founders, early investors and insider shareholders are all first in line, so mostly likely, you end up with shit, or maybe some options that might be worth something in a few years, if the company hasn't tanked by then. No thanks, unless I can take your company stock and flip it the same day, I'll take cash.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - throwaway9848 13y ago
        That's not always true.
- marcus_holmes 13y ago
  I tested it back when I ran a dev team. We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including: - no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline - if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time. - if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time. It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased. The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster. I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
  - grandinj 13y ago
    I'd like to second this - I ran the same stats once, while contracting for a customer with excessive demands. I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
- PilateDeGuerre 13y ago
  >How could one study it objectively? Here's a fix, and it comes from within: Give up the ideal of objectivity. Objectivity doesn't exist. I see this fallacy all the time from hackers. We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures. Embrace it.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    I feel that you're wrong about that.
    - quinnchr 13y ago
      If you think their is such a thing as objective truth in this world you must be some sort of postmodern miracle.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - telephonetemp 13y ago
        There is mathematics and physics, at least. A lot of arguing can be, and has been, had here but it's largely arguing about definitions; you cannot deny that they allow you to obtain the "truth" in the sense that that truth can be used to predict and affect what happens in the real world as far as your senses can best tell you. There's no arguing away fire or public key encryption.
        quinnchr 13y ago
        Yes all of those things exist and can make predictions about "reality," but that doesn't mean reality exists outside of my own experience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
        telephonetemp 13y ago
- throwaway9848 13y ago
  This is a billion or trillion dollar question, and there are many academics and industry analysts studying this and publishing results. It's just not in an area that the current HN audience is particularly competent in.
Wingman4l7 13y ago
Working even half an hour extra each day adds up to ~3 weeks a year of extra work that you're not getting paid for. That's several thousand dollars in wages. It's easy to dismiss a half-hour here or there but if you sit down and run the numbers, it's quite an unpleasant conclusion.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  I think the cost is much higher in terms of well being. As free time shrinks, each additional hour lost is increasingly burdensome.
- luikore 13y ago
  Why not just increase working efficiency by 1/8 and save that hour?
- matwood 13y ago
  What if your salary already has that factored in? What if you wouldn't have that salary without those extra 3 weeks/year you are working? To say it another way, if I only work 1 hour/day and run the numbers it is a great conclusion.
  - Wingman4l7 13y ago
    That's kind of what I'm getting at, though. If a job is advertised at $50k, and then you find out they expect you to work 9 hours a day instead of the usual 8, it's really more like $44k. Such discrepancies just make it harder to compare apples to apples when looking at the job market.
dalek_cannes 13y ago
Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending. Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don't work harder. The whole "if I don't do this, the project will sink / things will be destroyed" is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers count on.
- qq66 13y ago
  Where do these numbers come from that you proclaim them to be universal human standards? Why not 7 hours of work? Why not 9?
  - dalek_cannes 13y ago
    Don't take the numbers literally, and read it as "I believe every man deserves...". Merely an unscientific three-way split of a 24-hour day, with a liberal sleep quota and a traditional weekend. It's also the most defensible scheme against the old guard. Commuting is a different problem.
    - mnsc 13y ago
      I think that "logical" three way split with weekend was big reason why that battle was won. It seems "right" and a fair divide. But at the same time it is a great obstacle moving forward the logical path to less work hours and more free time. I don't know how the 35 hour work week in France is working out but I feel that they are the anomaly and could just as easily swing back to 39/40 hrs.
      - stuaxo 13y ago
        Of course 8 hours at work is not really 8 hours... it's 8 hours + time for travel. In the 8 hours for 'free time', a lot is taken up by chores etc. I totally agree that working less makes more sense - although we are much more productive, this has not gone into working less, or even paying people more (except those at the top).
tslathrow 13y ago
Seeing as I grew up on 80+ hour workweeks, I can promise you this is false for a certain group of people. I spent two years in banking - normally we had 18+ hour workdays... definitely gave me stamina later on. Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year. You pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work.
- pedalpete 13y ago
  This is not correct, you don't 'pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work'. I've worked in a few startups, as well as had my own where I was working 6-7 days a week 15+hours on most week days, and it didn't result in a big pay day. I've had lots of stock in bankrupt companies and experience to show for it. However, I will say that it is possible you'll gain lots of experience, and I wouldn't give up my long hours in my youth for anything else. It was great experience and I loved being in the thick of it. As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate more of a balance.
  - throwaway9848 13y ago
    "Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year." He was at a bank, not at a startup. Since you are not familiar with bonus structures at banks, what he's talking about could roughly double a salary in a _cash_ bonus.
  - hkarthik 13y ago
    He specifically said it was false for a certain group of people (those in banking). People in banking/finance have a very skewed sense of reality when it comes to work and fair compensation. You generally have to take their anecdotal advice with a grain of salt if that's all they've ever done. No line of work can consistently deliver the kinds of returns that finance can. Hence its very easy to justify the longer hours in that industry since they turn into very real dollars. For the rest of us, putting a dollar value on our output is much harder to quantify.
- e12e 13y ago
  Which kind of work did you do that wouldn't have been more effective if it was split in two (or even three) shifts (assuming it would've been possible to find qualified people to help/hire with/for the workload? How much of that time is for breaks/lunch etc? Genuinely interested in what an 18 hour work day consists of. Personally I can absolutely see "working" long hours -- but then that'd probably be something like 6 hours effective programming/planning/implementing and 6-8 hours of studying. Either that or doing some form of manual labour with which I'm familiar/skilled enough that slips in concentration wouldn't be damning. But even for those kinds of jobs, having three (or four) shifts to 24 hours would probably be much more effective (again, if possible).
gaius 13y ago
Those who fail to read The Mythical Man Month are doomed to... actually, just doomed.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I'd add PeopleWare to that reading list, if only for introducing the concept that overtime is offset by "undertime".
  - thenomad 13y ago
    And let's just add Slack in there for demonstrating all the benefits that not overworking people has.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      I've always meant to get read Slack. I read The Deadline and Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, both were excellent.
vonseel 13y ago
In my first development job, I worked very long hours — perhaps because I didn't have great mentors, often worked remotely, and found myself doing tons of learning/education just to get by. This was OK for a while; I had to pay my dues and learn how to do the job, but I do not think it is sustainable, after the first year I burned out and was ready to move on. Now, I prefer long, uninterrupted workdays, but I do not like to work much more than 40 hours per week. The traditional 5 day per week model is not perfect, though. I prefer 4 longer days (10-12 hours), and 3 days off.
jmvoodoo 13y ago
This entire piece is written from the perspective of someone who sees their job as only a way to make money. That person might look at me and say something along the lines of "look at him, wasting his life away spending time at work." To me, though, he is the one wasting his life spending even a few hours a day to do something he would not do for free. If you don't absolutely love your job, quit. And if you absolutely love your job, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?
- cgag 13y ago
  The thing about that is I need money to live. The intersection of things I'd do for free and tasks given to me by other people is very small.
- holri 13y ago
  Even if you love to run marathons, running marathons all day will destroy you .
- dalek_cannes 13y ago
  I love my job, and I love working extra hours on it. But on my own terms and as a means of building something more, not compensating for lack of planning or management. > why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes? Strawman. Everyone stays that extra few minutes. Sometimes even a few hours on occasion. That's not what 'long hours' here refer to.
  - jmvoodoo 13y ago
    Fair enough on the straw man. I definitely work closer to 70 hrs a week at the moment.
    - dalek_cannes 13y ago
      I've done almost 90. I don't recommend it!
- DigitalSea 13y ago
e12e 13y ago
This posts seems to resonate well with the "Electronic Arts Spouse"-post from 2004: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html (Poor management, poor planning, dropping productivity per hour worked as the workday is increased). It's nothing new of course, Ford pushed for 8 hour shifts, not out of the kindness of his heart. As for working "for free" -- that could be seen as poor labour laws. Norway has very strict rules regarding work hours (and compensation). Not that they're not broken -- but generally only managers (or others who realistically can set their own hours) are allowed effectively unlimited over time.
jroseattle 13y ago
I've found that long hours are indicators, sometimes of good things and other times not. Long hours over a lengthy duration of time have shown me two things: 1) an individual's work ethic, and 2) bad management. In the tech industry, specifically with software development, I've had teams I've managed where we needed to pull longer hours in order to meet a deadline. And my teams stepped up, because we all wanted to succeed. The long hours were a known entity, and weren't the negative long hours. I've also had teams forced into the negative long hours, and those were my fault (or rather, they were my responsibility to manage and I didn't do a good job.) Environments that somehow believe that those of us in the tech industry somehow enjoy acts like the "diving catch" and being "the savior" offer no value, other than learning what not to do. The biggest thing to be cautious with long-hour situations is burnout. The negative long-hour scenarios can lead to resentment, but those feelings often pass after a while. Burnout, on the other hand, can have very real long-term consequences.
joelrunyon 13y ago
On a side note: Your blog looks fantastic. Clean & simple without looking like it's trying too hard. Nicely done.
tikhonj 13y ago
I think the last point is also the most important: working longer hours does not make you more productive on an absolute scale! It's not that you accomplish less per hour, it's that you accomplish less full stop. Now, working an 80-hour week once in a rare while? That actually works. If you have a really important deadline or really need to get something done, sure. But doing it regularly is completely irrational. Take a look at "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work"[1]. [1]: http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-working-long-hours/ http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w... It's also very important not to fall into a trap that demands extreme hours often. It's too easy to think it'll be "just this once". And if it really is just once--for some very good reason--then fine. But if you catch yourself doing it repeatedly, watch out. If you want to accomplish anything, you should of course be willing to work hard. But, more importantly, you have to work efficiently. Constantly working long hours might be hard, but it's not efficient. Especially for a startup, how hard or long you worked simply does not matter--what's important is what you accomplished.
mekarpeles 13y ago
During my first startup, I worked 6 or 7 day weeks, 13+ hours a day. At Hyperink, in my first year, I (on my own accord) slept in the office over 30 days. During this entire stretch, I was perhaps more productive and happier than any other time I can remember. The main reason why? The teams and the comradery. I wish this article at least had relevant studies + statistics on this subject as it is not representative of any of the 4 startup experiences I've been involved with. Actually, in diametric opposition to this author's stance, our teams' cultures were united and strenghtened around the concept of working hard (which, in our case, happened to at least partly equate to long hours). I should be fair and admit, it may be the case that this article is more relevant to later stage companies -- I don't have a great amount of experience at 100+ employee companies. From my experience, when one loves what one works on, one often works on said thing a lot. Some of the hardest working people I know work (addictively) towards projects they're not (necessarily) paid to work on. For instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not). Im not so enlightened that I can draw conclusions about people who _don't_ work long hours, but it seems intuitive that people who do work long hours fall into one of two binary classes: (1) they are forced to (in order to achieve some level of compensation) / fear layoff, (2) they like the product, team, or like working hard. That is, intrinsically one either wants to work hard or they don't want to. You want people in the latter category, and you achieve this by being fair with equity, providing people opportunities to have an impact or work on what they love, by providing a supporting environment, and by having good hiring practices. There will always be great people who love your team / vision / culture / management (un)structure and who physically cannot commit to 70 hour work weeks (family, etc). You and your team have to decide whether it makes sense for this person to be part of the team and be prepared to make adjustments to make it work. What I wish this article was about: * How teams can (and should learn to) effectively prioritize teammates' health * Why pressure to work hard can be destructive * How to programmatically or systematically eliminate or amortize stressful tech/scaling/hr/bd problems to avoid disasters. [edit: fixing typos]
- zmitri 13y ago
  I appreciate you offering up fair counter points. I think anyone who reads this article should take a look at your response to understand what "long hours" can mean in a good way. Definitely agree there's a lot more to discuss. It's worth noting that the original article is content marketing for that company and they do not explicitly state that "culture consulting" is their business in the article. So it's fair to say they are using this as a mechanism to get more customers, and offering a fair point of view is secondary.
thenerdfiles 13y ago
There are many personal reasons people have for working long hours. Factor in: 1. Love of what you do 2. Computer addiction (which is not in the DSM (yet)) 3. Avoiding other forms of stress not work-related [EDIT:] Hello, Japan!
jasonkester 13y ago
Well said. Most of the points can be derived from the first one ("You are working for free"), much in the way that most of Mechanical Engineering can be derived from F=MA. Once you take that idea on board, the motivations behind companies, managers, clients, etc. creating a culture of "Heros That Work Long Hours" become rather transparent. Adding "long hours don't actually mean you get more stuff done" into the mix is just a little ironic icing to the whole situation.
- lnanek2 13y ago
  The thing is most early startup employees dip heavily into the equity/options side of the compensation. So they aren't working for free, they are working to make their equity share worth more by helping the company succeed.
ch215 13y ago
From my experience, I can only agree. Aged 24, I was given responsibly for a near 150-year-old weekly newspaper which is read by more than 30,000 people a week. Needless to say, I ended up working a quite ridiculous amount of unpaid overtime. Keep asking myself why I put in all the extra hours. Journalism's about as competitive an industry as exists but I didn't have self-advancement in mind. It wasn't because it was almost expected even if unwritten. Nor was it because of procrastination. The explanation that jumps to mind's two-fold. First, circumstance and necessity. The industry's not so much shrinking as shrivelling. By the time I left in July, I had two full-time staff to produce a newspaper which more oft than not numbered more than 100 tabloid pages. To give those numbers some context, there were many fewer pages and many more editorial staff when the paper was founded in the 1800s. Jobs simply needed doing and I was a willing horse. And second, pride. Not pride in long hours but pride in a job well done. I was a martyr to the readers' cause and I was going to put out the best paper in my power. However, three years later and long burned out, it was part a wider culture which culminated in me leaving the company. I've drawn similar conclusions to the author when he says work long hours--but only on your own terms.
alexkus 13y ago
Long hours often die out when the compensation (i.e. share options) dries up. I started off working 80+ hours a week, as did many of the others, and loved it. We all did pretty nicely out of it thanks to share options. But 10 years later, post acquisition(s), and most people who are still here have families and more life outside work. I work part time so I have a day with my daughter and I officially work 33 hours a week, in a "long" week I maybe work 35 hours and I rarely ever take my laptop home. It's all helped me to be a lot more focused in the relatively short time I am at work. I guess a lot of it is about experience and, as the saying goes, "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
kamaal 13y ago
I think the article is missing a very important point. Forced long hours are disastrous. But there are plenty of projects where people automatically put in long hours because the experience is rewarding. Either the money is good, or the project is interesting, or there is tons to learn. That varies from person to person. This is yet another thing that I see with regards to procrastination. It automatically seems to vanish every time I work on some interesting projects, or if good money is involved. If you are unconsciously procrastinating for no good reason, may its a good sign that you find that project no longer rewarding. And its time to move onto something else.
heuan 13y ago
This work hours issue is quite contentious. I don't want to stifle discussion but right now I wish there was a standard "gwen" response at the top of the thread with well researched papers on the subject.
mattlutze 13y ago
While I take issue ith the "deserves" comment floating around the top of the page, in general the article is spot-on. For the most part, extended periods of high volumes of work indicate a project is either under-staffed or poorly managed. Sprints and pushes now and again are exceptions -- there is nothing inherently wrong with needing to put in a long week or two, even a month or two, irregularly in order to get a feature out that just needs to be built. But extended continual work definitely does sap the creativity and stress every relationship a person has outside of the office.
kenster07 13y ago
I don't mind working long hours so long as I am actually gaining useful knowledge which I can leverage later to get many times those hours back.
kitd 13y ago
This reminds me of the section in Freakonomics[1] about how drug gangs are organised. Only the top guys actually rake in the money. The rank and file are wannabes giving their time and taking all the risk with little reward, in the hope that they'll get noticed. Ring any bells? Funny and scary in equal measure. *1 http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/
kenster07 13y ago
Find a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life.
dmd149 13y ago
I always feel super lazy when I read these articles criticizing excessively long work weeks. Honestly, I think 40 hours is way too long, especially when the bulk of it is boring. That being said, when you're working on something you enjoy and you get into that "flow" state, time becomes irrelevant. If something is fun and energizes you, you can do it without watching the clock, which the author does with his side projects. If you work at a regular job and say you get into that flow state for 2 hour or so, when you're done, you realize, "shit, i have to be here for another 6 hours." Then you spend a lot of time dicking around on the internet/answering e-mails/doing non mentally taxing stuff. However, those 6 hours are actually pretty draining/depressing because you have to maintain the illusion that you're working + deal with the guilt that you're not being productive. I dunno, maybe I'm just especially lazy and would like to spend as little time as possible working on things I don't enjoy.
- djKianoosh 13y ago
  a lot of comments here dance around the "quality" of hours. the "flow" state you describe is quality time. we all pretty much like that. on the flip side, if i'm at home 12 hours a day but my wife is in the other room and my child is watching tv while i'm on my phone checking twitter and hacker news... you get the point. all these numbers and thresholds are practically irrelevant. quality of time spent is key...
dev_jim 13y ago
"Working for free" after 40 hours never resonated with me. It comes out of hard fought labor battles, but an assembly line is difficult to relate to when I'm eating free snacks in my comfy Aeron chair and working on things that generally interest me. I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I've always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require >8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn't really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I've produced PnL.
- throwaway092834 13y ago
  I agree with your overall perspective. I'd like to add that the statement "If you’re salaried, you’re working for free" is inaccurate in two very important dimensions: 1) Equity stake. The 40 hour workweek was invented for laborers, not owners. Would the author admonish a business owner to only work 8 hours a week? At what level of ownership stake does it become acceptable to work more than 8 hours? 2) Compensation increase through recognition and achievement. Working extra hours may not increase one's immediate paycheck but after many years in this business I feel comfortable saying that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.
  - dev_jim 13y ago
    > that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term. I agree. I don't think I'd be in the same place in my career today if I had a "working for free" attitude. Sometimes it was more hours and sometimes it was just a genuine curiosity about taking on challenges that are completely foreign to me. Getting increases in comp is always a long-term game. There's no road map (i.e., work 2 more hours building this to get that experience which will increase my market value by X) and you'll go down a lot of wrong roads that will add zero to your market value. More importantly it requires delayed gratification. There can be a long delay between the work you put in and the payoff.
  - 13y ago
dustingetz 13y ago
"LONG HOURS ≠ MORE PRODUCTIVITY OR BETTER WORK." this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we'd rather to that. "We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline." This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.
- shadowfiend 13y ago
  The Mythical Man Month points out that adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project. In no way does that mean that adding hours does. They are completely unrelated ideas. Adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project because more people doesn't immediately mean more productivity. Adding hours can only accelerate a project if more hours means more productivity. There are multiple studies that show this is false after a short period (a week or two), and that you rapidly go in the opposite direction. The mythical man month's points are irrelevant to this. You're starting off with the base idea that there is something you can add can make a late software project more on time. Reality seems to indicate that often, a late software project will simply be late, unless you cut scope or corners mercilessly. Unless, in essence, you remove something.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    In some ranges, it's clearly the case that adding hours adds productivity. You are correct that we don't know it does this at the margin.
  - dustingetz 13y ago
    "From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. ..." wrote Phil Greenspun[1], here's the rest of the quote: "... Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated."[1] [1] http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineers http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... (halfway down the page on this)
the_watcher 13y ago
"Working for free" after 40 hours isn't necessarily accurate if you are on salary, at least if your company is run reasonably well. At my job, I'm paid a salary based on my performance and the quality of my deliverables. If I finish those in less than 40 hours, I am free to go home (although I generally stay and get some work done on projects that are less time sensitive), but if I have to stay late to finish them, I may end up working more than 40 hours. Nowhere in my agreement to come work here was 40 hours a week specified. If it became the norm that I worked 60 hours a week to complete my deliverables (and I wasn't sandbagging), I would ask for a raise to reflect that. However, I agree that many companies are not great at this. While my company is not perfect, their handling of this issue is one of the many things they do extremely well.
NDizzle 13y ago
My long hours story. (in summary form) Small company got acquired by a big 4 accounting firm. Lots of changes, seemingly lots of room for growth. Some people left. I stepped up (no promotion or raise) and took over for several departed people. Worked 12-14 hour days, 6 days a week, for 10 months. Received the highest performance award, which is given to 0.25% of the 50k+ employees in the US. Got a 1.25% raise because our unit was underperforming as a whole. Quit 4 months later. (after taking 2 months off after my second daughter was born.)
robg 13y ago
I'm a neuroscientist by training. I'm really surprised that we don't talk today about the brain among knowledge workers like we do muscles with professional athletes. We all know that less sleep, worse nutrition, and long hours affect how we perform. Yet, we still expect to work 60 to 80 weeks and be at our best? It makes no sense and some day we'll look back and wonder what this generation was thinking.
SubuSS 13y ago
Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the 'achieved level'. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of 'excelled levels'. 2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up. 3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won't be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this. 4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough. 5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren't going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding/debugging effort - no way around it. Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV. EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great & growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  " It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard." Why? Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
  - SubuSS 13y ago
    >Why? 1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere. 2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now. 3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams. That's off the top of my head. >Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture? I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.
richieb 13y ago
Next time you are on an airliner think what kind of "work ethic" you'd like your pilot to have. One who puts in 80 hours a week, or a "lazy" one who only works 30 hours per week. (Note that FAA actually limits how many hours a week an airline pilot can fly. I think the number is close to 30).
- robg 13y ago
  Truck drivers have their hours federally mandated too. Surgeons? Nope.
Mikeb85 13y ago
Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I've worked in industries where this is the norm - it's terrible. Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...
Nimi 13y ago
Something always troubled me: Why are long hours the equilibrium? If everyone is fighting to hire engineers, why not proudly declare "We're working 40 hours a week here, and still pay market rates"? Every engineer in town would consider working for you. Or not?
um304 13y ago
I work long hours and I know it adds 0$/hour into my account. My motivation is to build a product that I can proudly add in my portfolio and it may help me tap bigger opportunities in future. I consider it as investment, and I am fully aware that, like other investments, it may turn out to be zero. But then every effort worth-doing in life is a gamble and nothing comes with assurities.
diminoten 13y ago
No, this is what long hours mean to someone who doesn't want to work long hours but does out of some obligation or feeling that they should or have to. I've said it before, but these kinds of articles/blog posts always read as a justification on the part of the author for not working more.
elwell 13y ago
This: "There’s little difference in my productivity in a 80 or 40 hour work week."

220 points by johnjlocke 13y ago

gruseom 13y ago

This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?

Wingman4l7 13y ago
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie. If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
- gruseom 13y ago
  Pay is only one reason for work. If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument. I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
  - Wingman4l7 13y ago
    Well, sure -- I acknowledged more intangible benefits in passing -- but the poster wanted an objective way to measure it, so I gave them one. shrug
    - gruseom 13y ago
      You gave a way of measuring something else.
- oflordal 13y ago
  Most large companies will grade you based on your work adjusting bonus and the amount of stock you recive. That way there is at least some monetary incetive for it as well.
  - Wingman4l7 13y ago
    Working extra hours with that in mind would only be wise if you could accurately predict the reward. It would be a rude surprise if you worked extra hard all year only to hear "Sorry, no performance bonuses this year, our CEOs decided they weren't earning enough."
- throwaway9848 13y ago
  Yeah, and if you're in a startup and you have a significant equity position then you are not working for free, you are directly monetarily motivated. Also, people act to maximize their utility, not necessarily compensation. The act of working hard and hitting deadlines is a form of compensation in itself. Finally, lots of people work a lazy 8 hours (with lots of time spent on the phone, Facebook, personal email) and need the extra hours to accomplish 8 hours worth of real work.
  - Wingman4l7 13y ago
    Your last example is kind of irrelevant, because if you're honest with yourself, you're not counting the not-work hours.
    - throwaway9848 13y ago
      That's a fair point with your qualifier. I think a lot of people are not honest with themselves about this, though.
  - brianmcconnell 13y ago
    Ah! The equity position as fake compensation. Unfortunately for the worker beeze, said "equity" usually turns out to be worthless in a exit, except in unicorn situations (Facebook, etc). The founders, early investors and insider shareholders are all first in line, so mostly likely, you end up with shit, or maybe some options that might be worth something in a few years, if the company hasn't tanked by then. No thanks, unless I can take your company stock and flip it the same day, I'll take cash.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway9848 13y ago
      That's not always true.
marcus_holmes 13y ago
I tested it back when I ran a dev team. We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including: - no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline - if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time. - if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time. It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased. The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster. I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
- grandinj 13y ago
  I'd like to second this - I ran the same stats once, while contracting for a customer with excessive demands. I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
PilateDeGuerre 13y ago
>How could one study it objectively? Here's a fix, and it comes from within: Give up the ideal of objectivity. Objectivity doesn't exist. I see this fallacy all the time from hackers. We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures. Embrace it.
- philwelch 13y ago
  I feel that you're wrong about that.
  - quinnchr 13y ago
    If you think their is such a thing as objective truth in this world you must be some sort of postmodern miracle.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - telephonetemp 13y ago
      There is mathematics and physics, at least. A lot of arguing can be, and has been, had here but it's largely arguing about definitions; you cannot deny that they allow you to obtain the "truth" in the sense that that truth can be used to predict and affect what happens in the real world as far as your senses can best tell you. There's no arguing away fire or public key encryption.
      - quinnchr 13y ago
        Yes all of those things exist and can make predictions about "reality," but that doesn't mean reality exists outside of my own experience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
        telephonetemp 13y ago
throwaway9848 13y ago
This is a billion or trillion dollar question, and there are many academics and industry analysts studying this and publishing results. It's just not in an area that the current HN audience is particularly competent in.

Wingman4l7 13y ago

Working even half an hour extra each day adds up to ~3 weeks a year of extra work that you're not getting paid for. That's several thousand dollars in wages. It's easy to dismiss a half-hour here or there but if you sit down and run the numbers, it's quite an unpleasant conclusion.

dwaltrip 13y ago
I think the cost is much higher in terms of well being. As free time shrinks, each additional hour lost is increasingly burdensome.
luikore 13y ago
Why not just increase working efficiency by 1/8 and save that hour?
matwood 13y ago
What if your salary already has that factored in? What if you wouldn't have that salary without those extra 3 weeks/year you are working? To say it another way, if I only work 1 hour/day and run the numbers it is a great conclusion.
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  That's kind of what I'm getting at, though. If a job is advertised at $50k, and then you find out they expect you to work 9 hours a day instead of the usual 8, it's really more like $44k. Such discrepancies just make it harder to compare apples to apples when looking at the job market.

dalek_cannes 13y ago

Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending. Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don't work harder. The whole "if I don't do this, the project will sink / things will be destroyed" is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers count on.

qq66 13y ago
Where do these numbers come from that you proclaim them to be universal human standards? Why not 7 hours of work? Why not 9?
- dalek_cannes 13y ago
  Don't take the numbers literally, and read it as "I believe every man deserves...". Merely an unscientific three-way split of a 24-hour day, with a liberal sleep quota and a traditional weekend. It's also the most defensible scheme against the old guard. Commuting is a different problem.
  - mnsc 13y ago
    I think that "logical" three way split with weekend was big reason why that battle was won. It seems "right" and a fair divide. But at the same time it is a great obstacle moving forward the logical path to less work hours and more free time. I don't know how the 35 hour work week in France is working out but I feel that they are the anomaly and could just as easily swing back to 39/40 hrs.
    - stuaxo 13y ago
      Of course 8 hours at work is not really 8 hours... it's 8 hours + time for travel. In the 8 hours for 'free time', a lot is taken up by chores etc. I totally agree that working less makes more sense - although we are much more productive, this has not gone into working less, or even paying people more (except those at the top).

tslathrow 13y ago

Seeing as I grew up on 80+ hour workweeks, I can promise you this is false for a certain group of people. I spent two years in banking - normally we had 18+ hour workdays... definitely gave me stamina later on. Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year. You pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work.

pedalpete 13y ago
This is not correct, you don't 'pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work'. I've worked in a few startups, as well as had my own where I was working 6-7 days a week 15+hours on most week days, and it didn't result in a big pay day. I've had lots of stock in bankrupt companies and experience to show for it. However, I will say that it is possible you'll gain lots of experience, and I wouldn't give up my long hours in my youth for anything else. It was great experience and I loved being in the thick of it. As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate more of a balance.
- throwaway9848 13y ago
  "Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year." He was at a bank, not at a startup. Since you are not familiar with bonus structures at banks, what he's talking about could roughly double a salary in a _cash_ bonus.
- hkarthik 13y ago
  He specifically said it was false for a certain group of people (those in banking). People in banking/finance have a very skewed sense of reality when it comes to work and fair compensation. You generally have to take their anecdotal advice with a grain of salt if that's all they've ever done. No line of work can consistently deliver the kinds of returns that finance can. Hence its very easy to justify the longer hours in that industry since they turn into very real dollars. For the rest of us, putting a dollar value on our output is much harder to quantify.
e12e 13y ago
Which kind of work did you do that wouldn't have been more effective if it was split in two (or even three) shifts (assuming it would've been possible to find qualified people to help/hire with/for the workload? How much of that time is for breaks/lunch etc? Genuinely interested in what an 18 hour work day consists of. Personally I can absolutely see "working" long hours -- but then that'd probably be something like 6 hours effective programming/planning/implementing and 6-8 hours of studying. Either that or doing some form of manual labour with which I'm familiar/skilled enough that slips in concentration wouldn't be damning. But even for those kinds of jobs, having three (or four) shifts to 24 hours would probably be much more effective (again, if possible).

gaius 13y ago

Those who fail to read The Mythical Man Month are doomed to... actually, just doomed.

jacques_chester 13y ago
I'd add PeopleWare to that reading list, if only for introducing the concept that overtime is offset by "undertime".
- thenomad 13y ago
  And let's just add Slack in there for demonstrating all the benefits that not overworking people has.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I've always meant to get read Slack. I read The Deadline and Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, both were excellent.

vonseel 13y ago

In my first development job, I worked very long hours — perhaps because I didn't have great mentors, often worked remotely, and found myself doing tons of learning/education just to get by. This was OK for a while; I had to pay my dues and learn how to do the job, but I do not think it is sustainable, after the first year I burned out and was ready to move on. Now, I prefer long, uninterrupted workdays, but I do not like to work much more than 40 hours per week. The traditional 5 day per week model is not perfect, though. I prefer 4 longer days (10-12 hours), and 3 days off.

jmvoodoo 13y ago

This entire piece is written from the perspective of someone who sees their job as only a way to make money. That person might look at me and say something along the lines of "look at him, wasting his life away spending time at work." To me, though, he is the one wasting his life spending even a few hours a day to do something he would not do for free. If you don't absolutely love your job, quit. And if you absolutely love your job, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?

cgag 13y ago
The thing about that is I need money to live. The intersection of things I'd do for free and tasks given to me by other people is very small.
holri 13y ago
Even if you love to run marathons, running marathons all day will destroy you .
dalek_cannes 13y ago
I love my job, and I love working extra hours on it. But on my own terms and as a means of building something more, not compensating for lack of planning or management. > why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes? Strawman. Everyone stays that extra few minutes. Sometimes even a few hours on occasion. That's not what 'long hours' here refer to.
- jmvoodoo 13y ago
  Fair enough on the straw man. I definitely work closer to 70 hrs a week at the moment.
  - dalek_cannes 13y ago
    I've done almost 90. I don't recommend it!
DigitalSea 13y ago

e12e 13y ago

This posts seems to resonate well with the "Electronic Arts Spouse"-post from 2004: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html (Poor management, poor planning, dropping productivity per hour worked as the workday is increased). It's nothing new of course, Ford pushed for 8 hour shifts, not out of the kindness of his heart. As for working "for free" -- that could be seen as poor labour laws. Norway has very strict rules regarding work hours (and compensation). Not that they're not broken -- but generally only managers (or others who realistically can set their own hours) are allowed effectively unlimited over time.

jroseattle 13y ago

I've found that long hours are indicators, sometimes of good things and other times not. Long hours over a lengthy duration of time have shown me two things: 1) an individual's work ethic, and 2) bad management. In the tech industry, specifically with software development, I've had teams I've managed where we needed to pull longer hours in order to meet a deadline. And my teams stepped up, because we all wanted to succeed. The long hours were a known entity, and weren't the negative long hours. I've also had teams forced into the negative long hours, and those were my fault (or rather, they were my responsibility to manage and I didn't do a good job.) Environments that somehow believe that those of us in the tech industry somehow enjoy acts like the "diving catch" and being "the savior" offer no value, other than learning what not to do. The biggest thing to be cautious with long-hour situations is burnout. The negative long-hour scenarios can lead to resentment, but those feelings often pass after a while. Burnout, on the other hand, can have very real long-term consequences.

joelrunyon 13y ago

On a side note: Your blog looks fantastic. Clean & simple without looking like it's trying too hard. Nicely done.

tikhonj 13y ago

I think the last point is also the most important: working longer hours does not make you more productive on an absolute scale! It's not that you accomplish less per hour, it's that you accomplish less full stop. Now, working an 80-hour week once in a rare while? That actually works. If you have a really important deadline or really need to get something done, sure. But doing it regularly is completely irrational. Take a look at "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work"[1]. [1]: http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-working-long-hours/ http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w... It's also very important not to fall into a trap that demands extreme hours often. It's too easy to think it'll be "just this once". And if it really is just once--for some very good reason--then fine. But if you catch yourself doing it repeatedly, watch out. If you want to accomplish anything, you should of course be willing to work hard. But, more importantly, you have to work efficiently. Constantly working long hours might be hard, but it's not efficient. Especially for a startup, how hard or long you worked simply does not matter--what's important is what you accomplished.

mekarpeles 13y ago

During my first startup, I worked 6 or 7 day weeks, 13+ hours a day. At Hyperink, in my first year, I (on my own accord) slept in the office over 30 days. During this entire stretch, I was perhaps more productive and happier than any other time I can remember. The main reason why? The teams and the comradery. I wish this article at least had relevant studies + statistics on this subject as it is not representative of any of the 4 startup experiences I've been involved with. Actually, in diametric opposition to this author's stance, our teams' cultures were united and strenghtened around the concept of working hard (which, in our case, happened to at least partly equate to long hours). I should be fair and admit, it may be the case that this article is more relevant to later stage companies -- I don't have a great amount of experience at 100+ employee companies. From my experience, when one loves what one works on, one often works on said thing a lot. Some of the hardest working people I know work (addictively) towards projects they're not (necessarily) paid to work on. For instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not). Im not so enlightened that I can draw conclusions about people who _don't_ work long hours, but it seems intuitive that people who do work long hours fall into one of two binary classes: (1) they are forced to (in order to achieve some level of compensation) / fear layoff, (2) they like the product, team, or like working hard. That is, intrinsically one either wants to work hard or they don't want to. You want people in the latter category, and you achieve this by being fair with equity, providing people opportunities to have an impact or work on what they love, by providing a supporting environment, and by having good hiring practices. There will always be great people who love your team / vision / culture / management (un)structure and who physically cannot commit to 70 hour work weeks (family, etc). You and your team have to decide whether it makes sense for this person to be part of the team and be prepared to make adjustments to make it work. What I wish this article was about: * How teams can (and should learn to) effectively prioritize teammates' health * Why pressure to work hard can be destructive * How to programmatically or systematically eliminate or amortize stressful tech/scaling/hr/bd problems to avoid disasters. [edit: fixing typos]

zmitri 13y ago
I appreciate you offering up fair counter points. I think anyone who reads this article should take a look at your response to understand what "long hours" can mean in a good way. Definitely agree there's a lot more to discuss. It's worth noting that the original article is content marketing for that company and they do not explicitly state that "culture consulting" is their business in the article. So it's fair to say they are using this as a mechanism to get more customers, and offering a fair point of view is secondary.

thenerdfiles 13y ago

There are many personal reasons people have for working long hours. Factor in: 1. Love of what you do 2. Computer addiction (which is not in the DSM (yet)) 3. Avoiding other forms of stress not work-related [EDIT:] Hello, Japan!

jasonkester 13y ago

Well said. Most of the points can be derived from the first one ("You are working for free"), much in the way that most of Mechanical Engineering can be derived from F=MA. Once you take that idea on board, the motivations behind companies, managers, clients, etc. creating a culture of "Heros That Work Long Hours" become rather transparent. Adding "long hours don't actually mean you get more stuff done" into the mix is just a little ironic icing to the whole situation.

lnanek2 13y ago
The thing is most early startup employees dip heavily into the equity/options side of the compensation. So they aren't working for free, they are working to make their equity share worth more by helping the company succeed.

ch215 13y ago

From my experience, I can only agree. Aged 24, I was given responsibly for a near 150-year-old weekly newspaper which is read by more than 30,000 people a week. Needless to say, I ended up working a quite ridiculous amount of unpaid overtime. Keep asking myself why I put in all the extra hours. Journalism's about as competitive an industry as exists but I didn't have self-advancement in mind. It wasn't because it was almost expected even if unwritten. Nor was it because of procrastination. The explanation that jumps to mind's two-fold. First, circumstance and necessity. The industry's not so much shrinking as shrivelling. By the time I left in July, I had two full-time staff to produce a newspaper which more oft than not numbered more than 100 tabloid pages. To give those numbers some context, there were many fewer pages and many more editorial staff when the paper was founded in the 1800s. Jobs simply needed doing and I was a willing horse. And second, pride. Not pride in long hours but pride in a job well done. I was a martyr to the readers' cause and I was going to put out the best paper in my power. However, three years later and long burned out, it was part a wider culture which culminated in me leaving the company. I've drawn similar conclusions to the author when he says work long hours--but only on your own terms.

alexkus 13y ago

Long hours often die out when the compensation (i.e. share options) dries up. I started off working 80+ hours a week, as did many of the others, and loved it. We all did pretty nicely out of it thanks to share options. But 10 years later, post acquisition(s), and most people who are still here have families and more life outside work. I work part time so I have a day with my daughter and I officially work 33 hours a week, in a "long" week I maybe work 35 hours and I rarely ever take my laptop home. It's all helped me to be a lot more focused in the relatively short time I am at work. I guess a lot of it is about experience and, as the saying goes, "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

kamaal 13y ago

I think the article is missing a very important point. Forced long hours are disastrous. But there are plenty of projects where people automatically put in long hours because the experience is rewarding. Either the money is good, or the project is interesting, or there is tons to learn. That varies from person to person. This is yet another thing that I see with regards to procrastination. It automatically seems to vanish every time I work on some interesting projects, or if good money is involved. If you are unconsciously procrastinating for no good reason, may its a good sign that you find that project no longer rewarding. And its time to move onto something else.

heuan 13y ago

This work hours issue is quite contentious. I don't want to stifle discussion but right now I wish there was a standard "gwen" response at the top of the thread with well researched papers on the subject.

mattlutze 13y ago

While I take issue ith the "deserves" comment floating around the top of the page, in general the article is spot-on. For the most part, extended periods of high volumes of work indicate a project is either under-staffed or poorly managed. Sprints and pushes now and again are exceptions -- there is nothing inherently wrong with needing to put in a long week or two, even a month or two, irregularly in order to get a feature out that just needs to be built. But extended continual work definitely does sap the creativity and stress every relationship a person has outside of the office.

kenster07 13y ago

I don't mind working long hours so long as I am actually gaining useful knowledge which I can leverage later to get many times those hours back.

kitd 13y ago

This reminds me of the section in Freakonomics[1] about how drug gangs are organised. Only the top guys actually rake in the money. The rank and file are wannabes giving their time and taking all the risk with little reward, in the hope that they'll get noticed. Ring any bells? Funny and scary in equal measure. *1 http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/

kenster07 13y ago

Find a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life.

dmd149 13y ago

I always feel super lazy when I read these articles criticizing excessively long work weeks. Honestly, I think 40 hours is way too long, especially when the bulk of it is boring. That being said, when you're working on something you enjoy and you get into that "flow" state, time becomes irrelevant. If something is fun and energizes you, you can do it without watching the clock, which the author does with his side projects. If you work at a regular job and say you get into that flow state for 2 hour or so, when you're done, you realize, "shit, i have to be here for another 6 hours." Then you spend a lot of time dicking around on the internet/answering e-mails/doing non mentally taxing stuff. However, those 6 hours are actually pretty draining/depressing because you have to maintain the illusion that you're working + deal with the guilt that you're not being productive. I dunno, maybe I'm just especially lazy and would like to spend as little time as possible working on things I don't enjoy.

djKianoosh 13y ago
a lot of comments here dance around the "quality" of hours. the "flow" state you describe is quality time. we all pretty much like that. on the flip side, if i'm at home 12 hours a day but my wife is in the other room and my child is watching tv while i'm on my phone checking twitter and hacker news... you get the point. all these numbers and thresholds are practically irrelevant. quality of time spent is key...

dev_jim 13y ago

"Working for free" after 40 hours never resonated with me. It comes out of hard fought labor battles, but an assembly line is difficult to relate to when I'm eating free snacks in my comfy Aeron chair and working on things that generally interest me. I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I've always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require >8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn't really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I've produced PnL.

throwaway092834 13y ago
I agree with your overall perspective. I'd like to add that the statement "If you’re salaried, you’re working for free" is inaccurate in two very important dimensions: 1) Equity stake. The 40 hour workweek was invented for laborers, not owners. Would the author admonish a business owner to only work 8 hours a week? At what level of ownership stake does it become acceptable to work more than 8 hours? 2) Compensation increase through recognition and achievement. Working extra hours may not increase one's immediate paycheck but after many years in this business I feel comfortable saying that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.
- dev_jim 13y ago
  > that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term. I agree. I don't think I'd be in the same place in my career today if I had a "working for free" attitude. Sometimes it was more hours and sometimes it was just a genuine curiosity about taking on challenges that are completely foreign to me. Getting increases in comp is always a long-term game. There's no road map (i.e., work 2 more hours building this to get that experience which will increase my market value by X) and you'll go down a lot of wrong roads that will add zero to your market value. More importantly it requires delayed gratification. There can be a long delay between the work you put in and the payoff.
- 13y ago

dustingetz 13y ago

"LONG HOURS ≠ MORE PRODUCTIVITY OR BETTER WORK." this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we'd rather to that. "We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline." This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.

shadowfiend 13y ago
The Mythical Man Month points out that adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project. In no way does that mean that adding hours does. They are completely unrelated ideas. Adding manpower doesn't accelerate a project because more people doesn't immediately mean more productivity. Adding hours can only accelerate a project if more hours means more productivity. There are multiple studies that show this is false after a short period (a week or two), and that you rapidly go in the opposite direction. The mythical man month's points are irrelevant to this. You're starting off with the base idea that there is something you can add can make a late software project more on time. Reality seems to indicate that often, a late software project will simply be late, unless you cut scope or corners mercilessly. Unless, in essence, you remove something.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  In some ranges, it's clearly the case that adding hours adds productivity. You are correct that we don't know it does this at the margin.
- dustingetz 13y ago
  "From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. ..." wrote Phil Greenspun[1], here's the rest of the quote: "... Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated."[1] [1] http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineers http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... (halfway down the page on this)

the_watcher 13y ago

"Working for free" after 40 hours isn't necessarily accurate if you are on salary, at least if your company is run reasonably well. At my job, I'm paid a salary based on my performance and the quality of my deliverables. If I finish those in less than 40 hours, I am free to go home (although I generally stay and get some work done on projects that are less time sensitive), but if I have to stay late to finish them, I may end up working more than 40 hours. Nowhere in my agreement to come work here was 40 hours a week specified. If it became the norm that I worked 60 hours a week to complete my deliverables (and I wasn't sandbagging), I would ask for a raise to reflect that. However, I agree that many companies are not great at this. While my company is not perfect, their handling of this issue is one of the many things they do extremely well.

NDizzle 13y ago

My long hours story. (in summary form) Small company got acquired by a big 4 accounting firm. Lots of changes, seemingly lots of room for growth. Some people left. I stepped up (no promotion or raise) and took over for several departed people. Worked 12-14 hour days, 6 days a week, for 10 months. Received the highest performance award, which is given to 0.25% of the 50k+ employees in the US. Got a 1.25% raise because our unit was underperforming as a whole. Quit 4 months later. (after taking 2 months off after my second daughter was born.)

robg 13y ago

I'm a neuroscientist by training. I'm really surprised that we don't talk today about the brain among knowledge workers like we do muscles with professional athletes. We all know that less sleep, worse nutrition, and long hours affect how we perform. Yet, we still expect to work 60 to 80 weeks and be at our best? It makes no sense and some day we'll look back and wonder what this generation was thinking.

SubuSS 13y ago

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the 'achieved level'. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of 'excelled levels'. 2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up. 3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won't be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this. 4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough. 5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren't going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding/debugging effort - no way around it. Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV. EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great & growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.

keithpeter 13y ago
" It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard." Why? Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
- SubuSS 13y ago
  >Why? 1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere. 2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now. 3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams. That's off the top of my head. >Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture? I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.

richieb 13y ago

Next time you are on an airliner think what kind of "work ethic" you'd like your pilot to have. One who puts in 80 hours a week, or a "lazy" one who only works 30 hours per week. (Note that FAA actually limits how many hours a week an airline pilot can fly. I think the number is close to 30).

robg 13y ago
Truck drivers have their hours federally mandated too. Surgeons? Nope.

Mikeb85 13y ago

Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I've worked in industries where this is the norm - it's terrible. Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...

Nimi 13y ago

Something always troubled me: Why are long hours the equilibrium? If everyone is fighting to hire engineers, why not proudly declare "We're working 40 hours a week here, and still pay market rates"? Every engineer in town would consider working for you. Or not?

um304 13y ago

I work long hours and I know it adds 0$/hour into my account. My motivation is to build a product that I can proudly add in my portfolio and it may help me tap bigger opportunities in future. I consider it as investment, and I am fully aware that, like other investments, it may turn out to be zero. But then every effort worth-doing in life is a gamble and nothing comes with assurities.

diminoten 13y ago

No, this is what long hours mean to someone who doesn't want to work long hours but does out of some obligation or feeling that they should or have to. I've said it before, but these kinds of articles/blog posts always read as a justification on the part of the author for not working more.

elwell 13y ago

This: "There’s little difference in my productivity in a 80 or 40 hour work week."