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I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day, so the programmer I want (obviously) is one that works nights and weekends but gets shit d

by bsirkia 13y ago

I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day, so the programmer I want (obviously) is one that works nights and weekends but gets shit done the whole time. Do you think that if you worked nights and weekends (say another 20 hours a week) your total productivity would be diminished vs. your normal week because those extra hours aren't productive?

southpawgirl 13y ago
Burnout and tunnel vision would certainly ensue in the medium term; or someone external would intervene and snatch the programmer from you, by proposing them a better deal. It can still serve you well, depending on the market you're in, and how steep / long is the learning curve of your codebase - but I would argue it's not the best strategy in the long run.
ronaldx 13y ago
>Do you think that if you worked nights and weekends (say another 20 hours a week) your total productivity would be diminished vs. your normal week because those extra hours aren't productive? Yes, but it depends on what type of work is required. In creative work: if I don't get enough sleep, enough exercise, enough relaxation time, my personal productivity falls to at most a quarter of normal. Total productivity is surely less. In grunt/repetitive work: my productivity is affected a little but probably not enough to decrease total productivity, and I've noticed my work is appreciated more because I appear to be more 'busy'.
TylerE 13y ago
Absolutely. Working those kind of hours, especially doing something as mentally draining as programming, is absolutely soul-crushing.
nilkn 13y ago
Some oil & gas companies, like Chevron, believe so much that over-working your employees leads to an overall loss in absolute productivity and work quality that they give many engineers every other Friday off. Of course, you could rightfully question whether this is actually increasing the company's productivity or whether they are just so flushed with billions of oil dollars that they can afford to pay their engineers full-time salaries for slightly less than full-time hours.
- conjecTech 13y ago
  That's...not entirely true. They work what are called 9-80s, so they put in 80 hours over the course of the 9 days every two weeks that they do work. So they actually end up working more than 8 hours on the days they do work. Source: I worked for one of the majors w/ this policy.
  - nilkn 13y ago
    Well, my roommate is on this schedule and most certainly does not work more than 8 hours per full working-day on average. He might work 8 hours including the time driving to and from work. And on the Fridays he doesn't have off, he only works until noon or so. Maybe his case is not normal? Edit: Granted, I think another reason for this is that, based on his descriptions, there's a remarkable amount of bureaucracy involved in the oil companies. It's a very, very complex industry, and while it moves quite fast on a global scale, it moves very slowly for most individuals involved in it. His training program alone lasts a few years, so he won't really be a highly productive member of the company for quite some time.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Perhaps they have the billions of dollars to spare _because_ they don't overwork their engineers... Food for thought...
  - woah 13y ago
    Or perhaps they are pumping money out of the ground.
    - gaius 13y ago
      In the same way that programming is just typing stuff.
EastLondonCoder 13y ago
This has been studied quite extensively, for the majority of people productivity plummets if you consistently work more than 8 hours a day. You may be able to cram it for about two weeks but that effort needs to be payed back with more rest if productivity should stay the same.
- bsirkia 13y ago
  That's something I'm really interested in, basically figuring out your own productivity curve. If you work 8 hours a day productively, if you want to maximimize your weekly productive should you work both weekend days?
  - forgottenpass 13y ago
    For something that you're "really intrusted in", you really should familiarize yourself with the studies on workday/week hours and long term productivity. It will however put the kibosh on your plans to extract more value from your employees by working them to the bone.
moultano 13y ago
Having a correct insight can save 6 months of work. I only get those insights when I can take a step back, usually on the weekend.
bsirkia 13y ago
Thanks for all the replies, not psyched about the negative comment score :(
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- velis_vel 13y ago
  You're basically treating employees like their sole purpose in life is to be productive and nothing else. I honestly don't know how much you'd have to pay me to work 80 hours a week. I think it'd have to be in the range of billions so I could do it for a few months and then retire, heh.
Joeri 13y ago
Those extra hours have negative productivity. They cause you to make mistakes which take more time to fix than you gain in the extra hours. (Mistakes which you also make in the rest of the week by being more tired.) Read Peopleware if you haven't already. It covers myths like the 60 hour work week and outlines how to make software projects productive and predictable.
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  "Those extra hours have negative productivity." Can have negative productivity. I am all in favor of keeping work loads light, but in real businesses edge cases come up. We recently just got through a couple of really harrowing sprints because of such an edge case - a lot of hours were worked. Quality remained high. I personally am satisfied with what we delivered - while it could have been done better with more time, the tradeoffs were all understood and accepted. The flip side of that is that this kind of thing happens to a given team here maybe once or twice a year. The rest of the time is sane, normal working hours and load. If it were like this a significant portion of the time, then you'd start seeing the kind of patterns you're describing.
  - dreamfactory 13y ago
    It happens but you need to recognise the true cost. You always pay interest on the other side at some point. At the same time you weaken boundaries and introduce instability.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Well, does not really apply to my current job, but when I'm very interested in a project, if I don't put lots of hours towards it I can't produce anything more (or have fun in any other activity).
codegeek 13y ago
"so the programmer I want (obviously) is one that works nights and weekends but gets shit done the whole time." The programmer I want/to be is the one who gets shit done the whole time without working nights and weekends and actually spends time doing other things that also matter like family, friends. This way, he/she stays sane and more valuable.
TheCoelacanth 13y ago
Short term, you might see increased productivity. Medium term, productivity is going to go down because of exhaustion. Long term, unless programmers are just dying to work for you specifically, productivity will go way down because the best people will leave to work for someone who doesn't abuse them.
danielweber 13y ago
This is the management style of "I just bought a bunch of oranges. Now how do I squeeze the maximum amount of juice out of them?" Are you paying them 50% more than market for working for you an additional 50% hours?
- ronaldx 13y ago
  There should really be a 50% premium for the working hours, plus a unicorn premium on top of that. People willing to work a 60+ hour week are relatively rare. If you genuinely need that over the long-term, you have to pay for this rarity: in addition to the extra hours.
randomdata 13y ago
> I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day I agree with you, but not on a single task. If you want to hire someone who can program for a couple of hours, design your marketing material for a few more, work on your IT infrastructure for another couple of hours, and then maybe go off and do some sales work and meet with the rest of your team, you might have something that works. Of course, if you find someone who can do all those things well, they are probably off working on their own business and couldn't care less about what you are doing.
- sejje 13y ago
  Don't agree. At least, as a programmer, I know that having to switch into other modes really diminishes my ability to focus on the problem I'm solving (programming). Your day sounds like a way to turn a 40-hour programming project into a 80+ hour project.
  - randomdata 13y ago
    Maybe I cannot speak for everyone, but two or three hours is really about all I can take before I need a break of some kind (to stretch, to eat, whatever), and at that point you end up switching contexts anyway, so you may as well jump into something completely different when you return. It is no more costly to "load up" something new than to "load up" what you were working on before once the switch has happened. Now in the real world, where people expect you to do just one thing, I often do multiple two, possibly three, hour stints, with context switches in between each. However, I feel a lot better on the days when I'm able to do different tasks on each switch rather than coming back to the same task each time. You, naturally, still have to give that task your undivided focus while you are working on it. Trying to manage everything at the exact same time will definitely lead to what you suggest. Of course there are no hard rules. If, for example, you're having a good programming day, maybe you'll put in four straight hours before you feel the need to stop. It is not like you have to put your metaphorical pencil down as soon as the clock strikes the two hour mark.
  - jcannon98188 13y ago
    I interpreted it as saying the only way you can expect more than 8 hours of productivity constantly from programmers is if they do multiple tasks. And not saying that it would be ideal to have programmers do everything.
jamii 13y ago
Let's see what the science has to say: http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-working-long-hours/ http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w...
rayiner 13y ago
Unless your product is billable hours, you're probably not maximizing productivity at 60 hours per week.
emil0r 13y ago
Having done just that I later about for months before I started to see very noticeable effects. It took me a month to recover to a point where I wanted to look at code again. Half a year before I wanted to give it another try. In comparison I got a lot done when I spent two months working on code 4-6 hours a day including weekends.

by bsirkia 13y ago

southpawgirl 13y ago

Burnout and tunnel vision would certainly ensue in the medium term; or someone external would intervene and snatch the programmer from you, by proposing them a better deal. It can still serve you well, depending on the market you're in, and how steep / long is the learning curve of your codebase - but I would argue it's not the best strategy in the long run.

ronaldx 13y ago

>Do you think that if you worked nights and weekends (say another 20 hours a week) your total productivity would be diminished vs. your normal week because those extra hours aren't productive? Yes, but it depends on what type of work is required. In creative work: if I don't get enough sleep, enough exercise, enough relaxation time, my personal productivity falls to at most a quarter of normal. Total productivity is surely less. In grunt/repetitive work: my productivity is affected a little but probably not enough to decrease total productivity, and I've noticed my work is appreciated more because I appear to be more 'busy'.

TylerE 13y ago

Absolutely. Working those kind of hours, especially doing something as mentally draining as programming, is absolutely soul-crushing.

nilkn 13y ago

Some oil & gas companies, like Chevron, believe so much that over-working your employees leads to an overall loss in absolute productivity and work quality that they give many engineers every other Friday off. Of course, you could rightfully question whether this is actually increasing the company's productivity or whether they are just so flushed with billions of oil dollars that they can afford to pay their engineers full-time salaries for slightly less than full-time hours.

conjecTech 13y ago
That's...not entirely true. They work what are called 9-80s, so they put in 80 hours over the course of the 9 days every two weeks that they do work. So they actually end up working more than 8 hours on the days they do work. Source: I worked for one of the majors w/ this policy.
- nilkn 13y ago
  Well, my roommate is on this schedule and most certainly does not work more than 8 hours per full working-day on average. He might work 8 hours including the time driving to and from work. And on the Fridays he doesn't have off, he only works until noon or so. Maybe his case is not normal? Edit: Granted, I think another reason for this is that, based on his descriptions, there's a remarkable amount of bureaucracy involved in the oil companies. It's a very, very complex industry, and while it moves quite fast on a global scale, it moves very slowly for most individuals involved in it. His training program alone lasts a few years, so he won't really be a highly productive member of the company for quite some time.
chris_mahan 13y ago
Perhaps they have the billions of dollars to spare _because_ they don't overwork their engineers... Food for thought...
- woah 13y ago
  Or perhaps they are pumping money out of the ground.
  - gaius 13y ago
    In the same way that programming is just typing stuff.

EastLondonCoder 13y ago

This has been studied quite extensively, for the majority of people productivity plummets if you consistently work more than 8 hours a day. You may be able to cram it for about two weeks but that effort needs to be payed back with more rest if productivity should stay the same.

bsirkia 13y ago
That's something I'm really interested in, basically figuring out your own productivity curve. If you work 8 hours a day productively, if you want to maximimize your weekly productive should you work both weekend days?
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  For something that you're "really intrusted in", you really should familiarize yourself with the studies on workday/week hours and long term productivity. It will however put the kibosh on your plans to extract more value from your employees by working them to the bone.

moultano 13y ago

Having a correct insight can save 6 months of work. I only get those insights when I can take a step back, usually on the weekend.

bsirkia 13y ago

Thanks for all the replies, not psyched about the negative comment score :(

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
velis_vel 13y ago
You're basically treating employees like their sole purpose in life is to be productive and nothing else. I honestly don't know how much you'd have to pay me to work 80 hours a week. I think it'd have to be in the range of billions so I could do it for a few months and then retire, heh.

Joeri 13y ago

Those extra hours have negative productivity. They cause you to make mistakes which take more time to fix than you gain in the extra hours. (Mistakes which you also make in the rest of the week by being more tired.) Read Peopleware if you haven't already. It covers myths like the 60 hour work week and outlines how to make software projects productive and predictable.

GrinningFool 13y ago
"Those extra hours have negative productivity." Can have negative productivity. I am all in favor of keeping work loads light, but in real businesses edge cases come up. We recently just got through a couple of really harrowing sprints because of such an edge case - a lot of hours were worked. Quality remained high. I personally am satisfied with what we delivered - while it could have been done better with more time, the tradeoffs were all understood and accepted. The flip side of that is that this kind of thing happens to a given team here maybe once or twice a year. The rest of the time is sane, normal working hours and load. If it were like this a significant portion of the time, then you'd start seeing the kind of patterns you're describing.
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  It happens but you need to recognise the true cost. You always pay interest on the other side at some point. At the same time you weaken boundaries and introduce instability.
marcosdumay 13y ago
Well, does not really apply to my current job, but when I'm very interested in a project, if I don't put lots of hours towards it I can't produce anything more (or have fun in any other activity).

codegeek 13y ago

"so the programmer I want (obviously) is one that works nights and weekends but gets shit done the whole time." The programmer I want/to be is the one who gets shit done the whole time without working nights and weekends and actually spends time doing other things that also matter like family, friends. This way, he/she stays sane and more valuable.

TheCoelacanth 13y ago

Short term, you might see increased productivity. Medium term, productivity is going to go down because of exhaustion. Long term, unless programmers are just dying to work for you specifically, productivity will go way down because the best people will leave to work for someone who doesn't abuse them.

danielweber 13y ago

This is the management style of "I just bought a bunch of oranges. Now how do I squeeze the maximum amount of juice out of them?" Are you paying them 50% more than market for working for you an additional 50% hours?

ronaldx 13y ago
There should really be a 50% premium for the working hours, plus a unicorn premium on top of that. People willing to work a 60+ hour week are relatively rare. If you genuinely need that over the long-term, you have to pay for this rarity: in addition to the extra hours.

randomdata 13y ago

> I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day I agree with you, but not on a single task. If you want to hire someone who can program for a couple of hours, design your marketing material for a few more, work on your IT infrastructure for another couple of hours, and then maybe go off and do some sales work and meet with the rest of your team, you might have something that works. Of course, if you find someone who can do all those things well, they are probably off working on their own business and couldn't care less about what you are doing.

sejje 13y ago
Don't agree. At least, as a programmer, I know that having to switch into other modes really diminishes my ability to focus on the problem I'm solving (programming). Your day sounds like a way to turn a 40-hour programming project into a 80+ hour project.
- randomdata 13y ago
  Maybe I cannot speak for everyone, but two or three hours is really about all I can take before I need a break of some kind (to stretch, to eat, whatever), and at that point you end up switching contexts anyway, so you may as well jump into something completely different when you return. It is no more costly to "load up" something new than to "load up" what you were working on before once the switch has happened. Now in the real world, where people expect you to do just one thing, I often do multiple two, possibly three, hour stints, with context switches in between each. However, I feel a lot better on the days when I'm able to do different tasks on each switch rather than coming back to the same task each time. You, naturally, still have to give that task your undivided focus while you are working on it. Trying to manage everything at the exact same time will definitely lead to what you suggest. Of course there are no hard rules. If, for example, you're having a good programming day, maybe you'll put in four straight hours before you feel the need to stop. It is not like you have to put your metaphorical pencil down as soon as the clock strikes the two hour mark.
- jcannon98188 13y ago
  I interpreted it as saying the only way you can expect more than 8 hours of productivity constantly from programmers is if they do multiple tasks. And not saying that it would be ideal to have programmers do everything.

jamii 13y ago

Let's see what the science has to say: http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-working-long-hours/ http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w...

rayiner 13y ago

Unless your product is billable hours, you're probably not maximizing productivity at 60 hours per week.

emil0r 13y ago

Having done just that I later about for months before I started to see very noticeable effects. It took me a month to recover to a point where I wanted to look at code again. Half a year before I wanted to give it another try. In comparison I got a lot done when I spent two months working on code 4-6 hours a day including weekends.