6 ms·

Stop Working All Those Hours

109 points by cycojesus 14y ago

tomjen3 14y ago
Do people actually work all those hours or do people appear to work all those hours?
- hippich 14y ago
  it happens both ways. some people actually work 60 hours a week
  - k3n 14y ago
    And then you have guys like a co-worker that I have, who is known for staying at this 9-5 job until 2am sometimes: most of the time that I walk by his cube, he's reading Facebook/doing some other shit that's not related to work.
    - hippich 14y ago
      yeah. this happens too. it is just the fact that you can not relate hours into productivity. it might be really productive and passion employee, or might be un-socialize-able slacker who just decided to slack at office instead of doing same thing at home. Once you get married this might go away, so if you know that person is married AND staying late - it probably have higher probability that (s)he is working and not slacking.
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Or maybe his marriage is not a happy one and he's avoiding being at home.
- hudibras 14y ago
  "That fits my observation of New York law firms, where associates routinely bill 3,000 hours each year. That equates to 60 hours per week during a 50 week year; including non-billable hours, these 3,000-hour lawyers generally worked 12 hour days, six days a week." When I read that, my first thought is overbilling, not overworking.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    Say the firm bills in 0.25 hour increments. Spend 10 minutes reading emails from 4 different clients, and you've billed an hour.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      And you are on course to meet a different lawyer when you are sued for double billing.
  - bignoggins 14y ago
    you can't bill unless you are actively working on the case. So that's 60 BILLABLE hours, which often translates to 80+ hours total including breaks.
coreygoodie 14y ago
Yeah, right. I wish.
- tadruj 14y ago
  This is exactly the scenario that Stairway app, posted today on HN is addressing.
dsr_ 14y ago
The article is aimed at the wrong people. Corporate culture starts at the top. Stop judging your employees by the hours they appear, and judge them on results. If you can't measure results, you were in trouble already.
- wilhow 14y ago
  I agree. Most of the people who works that kind of hours already know and agree with the article. This article should've been directed at the managers who require that kind of hours from the employes.
- simplezeal 14y ago
  I should add to that - not just results but quality of results. Software development is a tricky profession to measure for quality - outside of bug count (which may be heavily influenced by quality of testing) and code coverage numbers (those can miss some really nasty edge cases) the only thing you can measure is how long it takes to make change to existing code. I have seen numerous cases where the person implementing the code is rewarded and next one comes along, and rewrites the code since first one is too hard to change. He gets rewarded too and cycle continues.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  We all know the story of managers asking for lines of code... The trick instead is for those at the top to inculcate a culture where those below are working for good final results directly rather than working to either create an appearance or to satisfy some metric. If you someone is result-focused, you can relax about the hours they're working.
  - readme 14y ago
    This is why I love contract work. Is it done? No bugs? Great. Client is happy.
- _wesley_ 14y ago
  I agree completely. As the employee in the scenario, how do you influence your boss to buy into this new mindset of judging productivity and utility?
com2kid 14y ago
Except, I enjoy working all those hours. When I am coding, I am alive, it is my creative outlet and the way I contribute to the world. On the other hand I will readily admit that maintaining a healthy work/life balance is key, and knowing not to push one's self to the breaking point is an important bit of self awareness. Now for management, well, they need to judge by both results short and long term. Employees working extra long weeks to complete this sprint? Sure the sprint gets done, but if after 2 or 3 sprints half your team leaves, well, the product schedule is going to suffer. :)
- ams6110 14y ago
  Yeah, I think working long hours is fine as long as you enjoy it, and are not neglecting other responsibilities (family/kids being the main one, if you have any). It's important to not build up a sleep deficit though, as that can lead to health problems, burnout, eventually depression, etc. But as long as you are enjoying work and getting enough sleep at night, I say go for it.
hkmurakami 14y ago
The article addresses lawyers, consultants, and analysts, and later brings up an anecdote involving law firm associates. Of course these people work long hours -- they have an incentive to do so, as they wisely learn that they must at least put up the facade of working long hours, else they will be passed up for promotion and eventual partnership.
- endersshadow 14y ago
  The other incentive, of course, is that most of them earn revenue by the hour.
  - malachismith 14y ago
    Earn for their employers. Yes. Earn for themselves? Not so much.
larrik 14y ago
Lawyers and consultants bill by the hour. More hours == more money. While their value to the customer may be lower, their value to the firm is likely right on target.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  There's some movement toward outcomes-based payment even in these fields, particularly in corporate law. Not commonplace for personal legal support yet though.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  The more productive you are, the more you can charge.
lmkg 14y ago
Grading knowledge workers based on ass-in-seat time is like grading programs based on lines of code. Which, as Bill Gates once famously said, is like grading aircrafts by weight. Time, lines, and weight aren't the goals of their respective domains, they're resources that are utilized to accomplish the goal. Judging solely by resource consumption penalizes efficiency. I think part of the problem, at least in the States, is that we have this ideal of hard work and determination paying off, and lionizing work ethic above talent, skill, education, intelligence, etc. While it's certainly true that work ethic can overcome lack of any of the above, the idea that work == success is just as fallacious as the idea that, say, education == success. A little cleverness, plus a little laziness, can make often make the same amount of labor go a lot further, so judging just effort is missing a big part of the picture.
- mhurron 14y ago
  I don't believe it's some work ethic that is at issue. It is a 'if your ass isn't in the seat you're not making me money.' It's the same reason sick time in the US is so low, why vacation time in the US is so low, why showing up on time is so god damn important and why any activity that isn't making you or your employer money is looked down upon as a waste of time. In many ways, the US economy never grew out of the slave labor mentality.
  - aaronblohowiak 14y ago
    > why showing up on time is so god damn important This is a matter of not wasting other people's time, it is a matter of respect. If you prioritize and plan accordingly, being prompt is usually quite easy. If you haven't done so, then you are effectively saying that your laziness is more important than your compatriot's time. Of course, this is only important when one of the parties has this view (it is some sort of prisoner's dilema, I think.)
    - _delirium 14y ago
      It really depends on how much coordination is needed on a daily basis, I think. In tech especially there are a reasonable number of companies that are fairly lax on caring what precise hours you keep, so long as the git pushes and bug triage keep coming.
Loic 14y ago
Starting with Ford for line workers in production, we know that long hours are not equal to quality. They know it in these law firms, software companies, basically nearly everywhere (people are not stupid). So why this still done like that? Because it easier to answer the question: "How many hours have you been working this week?" than "What value have you brought to the company this week?" We substitute an easy question to a harder one and we feel we answered the hard one. Edit: Fixed grammar/typos
jwingy 14y ago
Working longer hours also seems to be counter-productive over the long run: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101
jakejake 14y ago
I pretty much agree about being more intelligent about work rather than just putting in the hours. I'm not sure I agree about doing B+ work on projects that you don't like, I find those are the ones that tend to continually suck up time come back to haunt you. At least with programming that can be the case, perhaps not with other types of positions.
MattRogish 14y ago
I can't keep over-emphasizing the "Results Only Work Environment" (http://www.gorowe.com/ http://www.gorowe.com/). Everyone at my company is evaluated on results - ONLY. Not hours. Just whether or not you're getting your work done, awesomely. If you get a whole week's worth of tasks done in 20 minutes you're done for the rest of the week. Obviously we did a bad job of estimating (a silly case of course) but - you're done. You don't get more work shoved on your stack. Sit on the beach if you want. Sure, you can work more, but you're not expected to.
- markokocic 14y ago
  > Sure, you can work more, but you're not expected to. Are you sure about this? I tend to believe you really mean this, but it's hard to believe that you, or other managers are not looking at someone doing 20 minutes of work a week as a weasel that hacked a system.
  - MattRogish 14y ago
    I look at it like this: * Employees are adults who deserve to be treated with honesty, integrity, and respect. In a word: Trust. If they violate that trust, they're out. I suspect if we indeed estimated a week's worth of work that ended up being literally a NO-OP, the kind of person I'd work with would realize this and re-assess the situation. In the least, part of our process (and a "result" that people are tracked against) is "continuous improvement" and part of that would be recognizing we messed up somewhere to have that situation occur. Hiding this wouldn't be meeting that result. It's an extreme example, agreed, but it illustrates a key point: if "management" can hold you accountable for not meeting your goals then they have to be comfortable when you do meet them. Part of the explicit agreement of ROWE is that this is a fair and equitable relationship. Having management assign you more work because you got it done "faster" goes against that agreement. We track and iterate professional growth weekly. Thus, the expected results are set and evaluated on a week-by-week basis. People tend to find their unique rhythm within a few weeks and reach steady state.
    - markokocic 14y ago
michaelochurch 14y ago
It has nothing to do with effectiveness or performance. It comes down to the importance, in some social theaters, of shared suffering. When the company or group is doing well, the rockstars are the people who push forward and come up with new ideas. When things are falling apart, it's reliable/available people who get the benefit of the doubt and will advance. Ass-in-seat time matters most at companies that are stagnant or in trouble, because no one wants to be scapegoated as the slacker. (Bad managers tend to blame problems resulting from their lack of focus and effectiveness on "lazy" people not working enough hours.) If you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, it might be worth it to log long hours for a month or two for the credibility that comes from having suffered with the group, especially as the company/group grows and becomes cliquish and the before/after crowd distinction starts to matter. If it's permanent, it's usually better to find a new job.
- yuhong 14y ago
  BTW, michaelochurch, can you respond to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044267
- yuhong 14y ago
  And OT, but you pointed out many problems at Google in your previous comments on HN. What would you suggest to the Google founders?
- rwallace 14y ago
  > If you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, it might be worth it to log long hours for a month or two I understand your point, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here. In a company run that irrationally, if you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, let's be honest, the probability of this really being the case is smaller than the probability that you have talked yourself into believing what you so badly want to believe.
markokocic 14y ago
What you measure (and reward) is what you will get. If long hours are mandatory, people will just tend to do the same, if not lower, amount of work in those 12 hours than what they would otherwise do in 8 hours. And why would they care about quality if that's not rewarded? They could always say: "But I worked for 12 hours a day.".
lucian1900 14y ago
Pop-up ad. I didn't even bother reading.

109 points by cycojesus 14y ago

tomjen3 14y ago

Do people actually work all those hours or do people appear to work all those hours?

hippich 14y ago
it happens both ways. some people actually work 60 hours a week
- k3n 14y ago
  And then you have guys like a co-worker that I have, who is known for staying at this 9-5 job until 2am sometimes: most of the time that I walk by his cube, he's reading Facebook/doing some other shit that's not related to work.
  - hippich 14y ago
    yeah. this happens too. it is just the fact that you can not relate hours into productivity. it might be really productive and passion employee, or might be un-socialize-able slacker who just decided to slack at office instead of doing same thing at home. Once you get married this might go away, so if you know that person is married AND staying late - it probably have higher probability that (s)he is working and not slacking.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Or maybe his marriage is not a happy one and he's avoiding being at home.
hudibras 14y ago
"That fits my observation of New York law firms, where associates routinely bill 3,000 hours each year. That equates to 60 hours per week during a 50 week year; including non-billable hours, these 3,000-hour lawyers generally worked 12 hour days, six days a week." When I read that, my first thought is overbilling, not overworking.
- ams6110 14y ago
  Say the firm bills in 0.25 hour increments. Spend 10 minutes reading emails from 4 different clients, and you've billed an hour.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    And you are on course to meet a different lawyer when you are sued for double billing.
- bignoggins 14y ago
  you can't bill unless you are actively working on the case. So that's 60 BILLABLE hours, which often translates to 80+ hours total including breaks.

coreygoodie 14y ago

Yeah, right. I wish.

tadruj 14y ago
This is exactly the scenario that Stairway app, posted today on HN is addressing.

dsr_ 14y ago

The article is aimed at the wrong people. Corporate culture starts at the top. Stop judging your employees by the hours they appear, and judge them on results. If you can't measure results, you were in trouble already.

wilhow 14y ago
I agree. Most of the people who works that kind of hours already know and agree with the article. This article should've been directed at the managers who require that kind of hours from the employes.
simplezeal 14y ago
I should add to that - not just results but quality of results. Software development is a tricky profession to measure for quality - outside of bug count (which may be heavily influenced by quality of testing) and code coverage numbers (those can miss some really nasty edge cases) the only thing you can measure is how long it takes to make change to existing code. I have seen numerous cases where the person implementing the code is rewarded and next one comes along, and rewrites the code since first one is too hard to change. He gets rewarded too and cycle continues.
joe_the_user 14y ago
We all know the story of managers asking for lines of code... The trick instead is for those at the top to inculcate a culture where those below are working for good final results directly rather than working to either create an appearance or to satisfy some metric. If you someone is result-focused, you can relax about the hours they're working.
- readme 14y ago
  This is why I love contract work. Is it done? No bugs? Great. Client is happy.
_wesley_ 14y ago
I agree completely. As the employee in the scenario, how do you influence your boss to buy into this new mindset of judging productivity and utility?

com2kid 14y ago

Except, I enjoy working all those hours. When I am coding, I am alive, it is my creative outlet and the way I contribute to the world. On the other hand I will readily admit that maintaining a healthy work/life balance is key, and knowing not to push one's self to the breaking point is an important bit of self awareness. Now for management, well, they need to judge by both results short and long term. Employees working extra long weeks to complete this sprint? Sure the sprint gets done, but if after 2 or 3 sprints half your team leaves, well, the product schedule is going to suffer. :)

ams6110 14y ago
Yeah, I think working long hours is fine as long as you enjoy it, and are not neglecting other responsibilities (family/kids being the main one, if you have any). It's important to not build up a sleep deficit though, as that can lead to health problems, burnout, eventually depression, etc. But as long as you are enjoying work and getting enough sleep at night, I say go for it.

hkmurakami 14y ago

The article addresses lawyers, consultants, and analysts, and later brings up an anecdote involving law firm associates. Of course these people work long hours -- they have an incentive to do so, as they wisely learn that they must at least put up the facade of working long hours, else they will be passed up for promotion and eventual partnership.

endersshadow 14y ago
The other incentive, of course, is that most of them earn revenue by the hour.
- malachismith 14y ago
  Earn for their employers. Yes. Earn for themselves? Not so much.

larrik 14y ago

Lawyers and consultants bill by the hour. More hours == more money. While their value to the customer may be lower, their value to the firm is likely right on target.

dredmorbius 14y ago
There's some movement toward outcomes-based payment even in these fields, particularly in corporate law. Not commonplace for personal legal support yet though.
einhverfr 14y ago
The more productive you are, the more you can charge.

lmkg 14y ago

Grading knowledge workers based on ass-in-seat time is like grading programs based on lines of code. Which, as Bill Gates once famously said, is like grading aircrafts by weight. Time, lines, and weight aren't the goals of their respective domains, they're resources that are utilized to accomplish the goal. Judging solely by resource consumption penalizes efficiency. I think part of the problem, at least in the States, is that we have this ideal of hard work and determination paying off, and lionizing work ethic above talent, skill, education, intelligence, etc. While it's certainly true that work ethic can overcome lack of any of the above, the idea that work == success is just as fallacious as the idea that, say, education == success. A little cleverness, plus a little laziness, can make often make the same amount of labor go a lot further, so judging just effort is missing a big part of the picture.

mhurron 14y ago
I don't believe it's some work ethic that is at issue. It is a 'if your ass isn't in the seat you're not making me money.' It's the same reason sick time in the US is so low, why vacation time in the US is so low, why showing up on time is so god damn important and why any activity that isn't making you or your employer money is looked down upon as a waste of time. In many ways, the US economy never grew out of the slave labor mentality.
- aaronblohowiak 14y ago
  > why showing up on time is so god damn important This is a matter of not wasting other people's time, it is a matter of respect. If you prioritize and plan accordingly, being prompt is usually quite easy. If you haven't done so, then you are effectively saying that your laziness is more important than your compatriot's time. Of course, this is only important when one of the parties has this view (it is some sort of prisoner's dilema, I think.)
  - _delirium 14y ago
    It really depends on how much coordination is needed on a daily basis, I think. In tech especially there are a reasonable number of companies that are fairly lax on caring what precise hours you keep, so long as the git pushes and bug triage keep coming.

Loic 14y ago

Starting with Ford for line workers in production, we know that long hours are not equal to quality. They know it in these law firms, software companies, basically nearly everywhere (people are not stupid). So why this still done like that? Because it easier to answer the question: "How many hours have you been working this week?" than "What value have you brought to the company this week?" We substitute an easy question to a harder one and we feel we answered the hard one. Edit: Fixed grammar/typos

jwingy 14y ago

Working longer hours also seems to be counter-productive over the long run: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101

jakejake 14y ago

I pretty much agree about being more intelligent about work rather than just putting in the hours. I'm not sure I agree about doing B+ work on projects that you don't like, I find those are the ones that tend to continually suck up time come back to haunt you. At least with programming that can be the case, perhaps not with other types of positions.

MattRogish 14y ago

I can't keep over-emphasizing the "Results Only Work Environment" (http://www.gorowe.com/ http://www.gorowe.com/). Everyone at my company is evaluated on results - ONLY. Not hours. Just whether or not you're getting your work done, awesomely. If you get a whole week's worth of tasks done in 20 minutes you're done for the rest of the week. Obviously we did a bad job of estimating (a silly case of course) but - you're done. You don't get more work shoved on your stack. Sit on the beach if you want. Sure, you can work more, but you're not expected to.

markokocic 14y ago
> Sure, you can work more, but you're not expected to. Are you sure about this? I tend to believe you really mean this, but it's hard to believe that you, or other managers are not looking at someone doing 20 minutes of work a week as a weasel that hacked a system.
- MattRogish 14y ago
  I look at it like this: * Employees are adults who deserve to be treated with honesty, integrity, and respect. In a word: Trust. If they violate that trust, they're out. I suspect if we indeed estimated a week's worth of work that ended up being literally a NO-OP, the kind of person I'd work with would realize this and re-assess the situation. In the least, part of our process (and a "result" that people are tracked against) is "continuous improvement" and part of that would be recognizing we messed up somewhere to have that situation occur. Hiding this wouldn't be meeting that result. It's an extreme example, agreed, but it illustrates a key point: if "management" can hold you accountable for not meeting your goals then they have to be comfortable when you do meet them. Part of the explicit agreement of ROWE is that this is a fair and equitable relationship. Having management assign you more work because you got it done "faster" goes against that agreement. We track and iterate professional growth weekly. Thus, the expected results are set and evaluated on a week-by-week basis. People tend to find their unique rhythm within a few weeks and reach steady state.
  - markokocic 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

It has nothing to do with effectiveness or performance. It comes down to the importance, in some social theaters, of shared suffering. When the company or group is doing well, the rockstars are the people who push forward and come up with new ideas. When things are falling apart, it's reliable/available people who get the benefit of the doubt and will advance. Ass-in-seat time matters most at companies that are stagnant or in trouble, because no one wants to be scapegoated as the slacker. (Bad managers tend to blame problems resulting from their lack of focus and effectiveness on "lazy" people not working enough hours.) If you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, it might be worth it to log long hours for a month or two for the credibility that comes from having suffered with the group, especially as the company/group grows and becomes cliquish and the before/after crowd distinction starts to matter. If it's permanent, it's usually better to find a new job.

yuhong 14y ago
BTW, michaelochurch, can you respond to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044267
yuhong 14y ago
And OT, but you pointed out many problems at Google in your previous comments on HN. What would you suggest to the Google founders?
rwallace 14y ago
> If you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, it might be worth it to log long hours for a month or two I understand your point, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here. In a company run that irrationally, if you think the crisis is temporary and a one-off, let's be honest, the probability of this really being the case is smaller than the probability that you have talked yourself into believing what you so badly want to believe.

markokocic 14y ago

What you measure (and reward) is what you will get. If long hours are mandatory, people will just tend to do the same, if not lower, amount of work in those 12 hours than what they would otherwise do in 8 hours. And why would they care about quality if that's not rewarded? They could always say: "But I worked for 12 hours a day.".

lucian1900 14y ago

Pop-up ad. I didn't even bother reading.