Honestly, for people who work more than 40 hours a week, how many of them are actually working more than 40 hours a week? Sometimes it feels like half my day is spent reading HN and the like. If I could focus much more, I'm sure I wouldn't need to spend more than 40 hours a week to get my stuff done.
having grown up on a farm, forty hours came and went usually mid week. In the business world its not the hours I work that wear on me, its the non productive hours during that do.
I guess the difference between the farm and business is that the former doesn't have non productive work. It is amazing how much energy I lose in meetings or similar.
A farmer working a 40 (60... 70... 80...) hour week can produce enough food to feed hundreds of people, freeing them up to do other things. If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.
It's not about quality of life. It's about fitness, in the evolutionary sense.
Agricultural lifestyles support an order of magnitude more people per unit land, and therefore are more fit, even if they're "worse" in subjective terms.
Also, the "mistake" didn't happen immediately. It's not like hunter-gatherer nomads immediately decided, "yep, we're doing this farming thing" and started domesticating crops and animals. It happened gradually, over thousands of years, with various intermediate shades where a group would do some of both. Over time, human societies got to a point where abandoning agriculture would be impossible, while hunting and foraging became more discretionary.
Yes, the worst thing about HN is that it's work related enough that you can sort of justify counting checking it as "work", indeed I've read things in HN comments and articles that have been very useful to my work.
On the flipside, I'm sure in practise it is a net time waster.
Someone I know all they do is draw/paint until their hand hurts every day. It's all work related for them. Yes... some people do work for real long hours and are not wasting most of their time. I think it's more the people who are not doing work chasing rewards but doing the work because they genuinely love it.
Use https://www.rescuetime.com/ and you can track your time spent working and easily block distractions so you can focus.
Every office is different with regard to the hours worked as well as when those hours are worked. I find the latter is more important than the former.
At my office most people get in around 9:30am to 10:00am, and leave around 8 hours later. What I found was that I couldn't get any work done around that time because productivity slows down to a crawl in the middle of the day, usually due to meetings, figuring out what they need to do for the day, or the usual inter-cubicle communication.
I fixed this for myself by coming in early, around 7:00am. That means I have approximately 2-2.5 hours of uninterrupted time when I have peak energy. Then when everyone gets into the office I don't mind the interruptions. Those are the pros.
The cons are that I have to wake up at 6am to drive into the office (~40mins drive). As well, 8 hours from 7am is 3pm, but there's no way I can leave at that time without losing face. Instead, I leave at 4pm. I currently rationalize this extra hour of "work" by saying that I take a 1 hour lunch that I don't charge for.
Timeboxing myself into a 8-9 hour timespan means I really need to prioritize my work for the day. Once the clock strikes 3:30pm, I make it a mission to take the next 30 minutes to wind down and prepare for the next day. This has helped me reduce the stress associated with the work day.
Honestly, isn't the crux of the problem? Even if you are a superstar, you'll still get typecasted as smart-but-lazy and find yourself on the outside. Generally speaking, this is an organizational problem.
In many offices, you need to be around when things come up. There are very few jobs where you come in, work by yourself for 8 hours and then go home. Communication is important, and if you aren't there, it's hard to communicate.
Email, sms, voice can cope with crisis that arise. In a small office face is important; less important in an environment that's geographically distributed.
Very little communication I have around the office are crises - but they are important. If I insisted on having a completely different schedule from my coworkers, I'd either be impeding their work, or subjecting myself to emails, SMSes, calls, etc, outside of my work hours.
Lots of company have flex time so people can choose their hours but have some overlap for communications. This is also where the "mid day meeting rush" comes from that exacerbates the situation.
This. The medium of communication really depends on the type of content and it's priority.
High priority: call me or use some other synchronous communications protocol.
Everything else: email, ticket please. Async is better.
I'm used to working in geographically separated teams in different timezones, so starting my day 2 hours ahead of everyone else is no different than me working in a different timezone. Once you solve this problem, you have solved the majority of your communication difficulties.
It's no different than being out to lunch. You're 20 minutes away from the office in your scenario, and hopefully you're not the only person who can fix things. No one should be the company savior, and if you can't leave the office, you have bigger issues than working different schedules.
but the question is: what's the time range necessary for immediate communication? Do all developers need to be in full-communication mode for a full eight-hour span? And if so, when does code get written?
They don't need to communicate immediately, but when I ask a question to a developer I need them to get back to me on that same day. For most of my projects I cannot afford to wait until the next day for an answer. I emphasize this in every email I send. It usually goes something like, "I understand if you're busy working on something else at this very moment. However, this is for a project due tomorrow morning so I would appreciate a response before lunch/end-of-the-day."
You could use the extra hour to exercise. Go to the gym, or go for a bike ride, if your office has a shower. Exercise is almost as important as sleep for health and creativity. Lunch is included in normal 9-5 hours.
For me it's the exact opposite. I come in at 9.30am and leave at 6.30pm. Most of my coworkers leave around 4pm, which leaves me 2-2.5 hours at the end of the day to really get shit done.
I'm not a morning person. Understanding and accepting this has helped me manage my time much more effectively.
What you've defined is "core hours". This is the range of time in the day when meetings happen and productivity tends to slow down to a crawl. It sounds like your company's core hours are 9-4. It's fairly standard (some places have core hours being 10a-2p).
Most people who think they work 50-60 hours actually work 40 hours. Most people who think they work 40 hours actually work 30 or less. I've seen that for myself, working very hard from morning to mid-night taking breaks only to eat and tracking every minute, adds up to only 50 hours of REAL work per week (not counting Saturday Sunday). People work a lot less than they think they do. Track your EXACT time worked and see how much you really worked ... I've been doing this for at least the last year.
This is very true. I use RescueTime to monitor my output. This works for me because of the menial nature of much of my work in addition to ensuring that I'm completely honest in my logs / productivity scoring.
I shoot for eight "very product hours" (+2) per day. Even though the standard workday is considered eight hours, it's pretty difficult for me to hit such a target without invest 10-11 hours of what I would call pretty distraction free work. I'm self employed, so I'm able to avoid a large amount of the normal worktime lost to meetings, chitchat, and the like.
Comparing eight hours of "very productive" rescuetime output feels as if it would be comparable to about 12+ hours standard in a normal work enviroment.
Often, when I hear people exclaiming that they've put in a 70hour/week or whatnot I wonder how many very productive rescuetime hours that would correlate to... 50? 40?
Wow; I guess if you are doing product development, everything is so clear cut! But what if you are a researcher? Your primary output is creative, so measuring the amount of code or text you write is not very effective. I don't think just researchers have this problem, but anyone who has to do any substantial amount of real thinking or design, even most programmers have to think a bit about what they need to write. And sometimes you need to twist your brain to do it.
I'm a developer. I don't mind taking mental breaks during the day and still counting it as work since I solve work problems while driving, showering, or even sleeping all the time. I'm lucky enough to work for a supervisor that doesn't require time logs. I often wonder if I could get away with "I'm leaving for the day an hour early since I was thinking about the problem I'm working on while at home".
I find that most of the "most people" who fall into the category of "working" that many hours but actually only doing 40 hours of work related work are the younger/entitlement generation (I'm 35 fwiw)
When you are at work, do you work. You shouldn't be browsing reddit or checking facebook/twitter or fantasy football/espn. You shouldnt have a chat client open with friends/family (create a work only one)
At our office we are allowed (and encouraged) to read tech blogs such as hackernews, but no one abuses that and reads for hours on end.
We use RescueTime and part of our 8 hours includes email, irc (work #channel), instant message (work only 'friends' screenname), reading rss on top of the actual coding. No one is looked down on for having a high google/stackoverflow time in a week.
Two 4 hour blocks of coding is not that hard (and normally broken up with meetings or some form of communication anyways)
I find people that have to work 10+ hours to get in 8 actual work related hours are the same people who used to "NEED music" to study. Just have some self discipline and focus.
I've worked frequently where 40 hours is long in the rear view mirror by the end of the week, but it's completely unsustainable over a long term period. I saw a few friends I'd not seen for a while and when they asked what I'd been up to all I could think was "um, work?", which completely defeats the point of working. Building something awesome is, well, awesome, but for the most part you also need to have a life and enjoy yourself.
Yes, I had about 6 months to a year where I didn't really do anything but work and pay off debts.
The worst part is meeting up with friends who you haven't seen in a while and realising that you are officially the most boring person in the world because you have nothing interesting at all to talk about. It wasn't even like I was building something exciting that I could talk about.
... or recent travels or instruments they play or people they've seen or concerts they went to or adventures they've had or sports they play or side projects or dates or ...
Yep, and then after a few experiences like that you suddenly really you need to have some life. I started changing my priorities around so I can actually spend time with my girlfriend and friends. No point earning money if you don't use it to enjoy it.
Unfortunately the statement that 40 hrs a weeks is optimal for each and every person is yet another fallacy. I've started my first full-time job a year ago, I work in France as a dev on a 37.5 hrs contract (extended French 35 hrs in exchange for more days off, which is pretty standard in tech companies here AFAIK).
For the first couple of months, I've been drifting away mentally after 6.5-7 hrs. Now I'm used to it, and of course, sometimes when I'm in programming nirvana, I deliberately stay longer to finish some logical part of the task to avoid the recreating-the-context problems next day, but anyway even with avg of 37.5 hrs a week, in the long term I'm exhausted.
Long commute (2x1h) and living alone (everything's on my head) certainly do not help.
If you can, avoid working at companies located in the middle of nowhere. Location is the first thing I consider when working for a company, and if it means a real car commute or living in the middle of nowhere...the better tech companies understand having a decent location is very important in retaining talent!
I work at a company that has a mean age of probably 35-40. It has the great effect that 9-5 is pretty pervasive. I can take a half day without giving notice, work more or less than 8 hours a day. Doesn't matter as long as I get my stuff done. Honestly, if I'm having a productive day, I can't get more than 8 hours of work out of my brain anyway.
Take the "Germany bans 48 hours weeks" with a grain of salt. In certain branches, working 50 hours and more is still considered part of the codex, especially in advertisement agencys. Hours are rarely logged. Working long hours is still seen favourably in Germany.
The big problem is that basically working an unbounded amount of time without logging it hides problems: your work environment sucks and make you slow? Just work more and the problem goes away.
Same goes for the UK, to some extent: our politicians are generous enough to have secured for us the ability to "opt out" of the 48-hour limit. The result is that almost all employment contracts contain a clause opting the new employee out.
Having said that, I've personally never exceeded 48 hours in a week, and it may be that the prevalence of the opt-out is more due to a disinclination to add bureaucracy that to a desire to exploit workers.
I'm pretty sure opting out is optional, and you can't be made to do it as a condition of employment. The alternative is often that they'll have you do a lot of extra time-tracking to make your life more difficult.
I have gone over 48 hours by about 12 hours a week for a period of a month, because this stuff had to be done. I got a promotion out of it.
Now I'm independent people have to pay me up front if they want that.
the 48 hour week is an average over a 17 week period.
Even if you do opt-out, the next thing an employer comes up against is the minimum wage. You can't be working so many hours that your effective hourly wage is below the legal minimum.
I get this in the context in which it was initially studied: repetitive work that nobody would be passionate about, but I would theorize that with passion and variety you can extend this. In other words, you can only do 40 hours a week of factory labor, coding, sales calls, etc. However, you can do networking breakfasts at 7, alternate between a variety of tasks, do lunch meetings, product discussions, sales calls, and network until 7 Monday to Friday, then check email intermittently totaling an hour or two over the weekend.
So this is something like 60 hours and it sounds pretty sustainable to me, particularly if you have resources to avoid doing non paying work, such as chores. Anyone know if there is research to support this theory? Obviously that is relevant to startups.
I don't agree. You start work at 7am and leave work at 7pm. This takes twelve hours from your day. That leaves you twelve hours for: sleeping, eating, hygiene, commuting and personal time. Say you sleep the normal 7.5 hours per day (to keep a sustainable lifestyle) and commute a total of 1.5 hours per day. Now you have three hours left. Personal hygiene takes at least 0.5 hours per day. Even if you eat quickly, and take your breakfast as 'work', this leaves you 30 minutes per day for two meals. Or if you count lunch as work, then you gain an extra half hour. (Two meals a day as 'working meals' sounds pretty awful to me, btw.) Leaving you 1.5 - 2.0 hours per day of personal time. That's one visit to the gym, or the chance to play with your kids and put them to bed. There's no cultural involvement, no chance to work on a hobby or a passion, no reading, television, or film and no chance to see friends during the week at all.
I simply will not work for you if the only luxury that I get is the chance to visit the gym and whatever time at weekends is left after I finish answering what are almost certainly non-urgent emails. There are too many compromises. You'd need to be a fool to find that acceptable; there's simply no point in having the money from the job, because you won't enjoy it. You may enjoy the job for a while, but if you are a salaried employee, then that depends on factors outside of your own control and will change. And it's much harder to regain a pleasant life than it is to keep one.
Of course, if you are a startup founder, then we have a different meaning of sustainable. There are not very many people at all who live a startup-founder lifestyle for more than a couple of years without significant breaks, I believe. And I'm not saying that it is not possible to live like above - I'm saying that I'm good at what I do, and I don't need to, so I won't.
I tend to agree that European Working Times Directive was especially useful to protect low pay low skill (or semi-skilled) jobs such as factory work. Some fast food workers were expected to turn up for work, and when the restaurant wasn't busy they'd have to clock out, but stay in their waiting room until they got busy, when they'd have to clock in.
That's clearly abusive, and those workers needed protection.
If someone loves their job and wants to work 50 hours; or can work and enjoy the occasional 60 hours, well, it's their choice and they should be able to.
But most people do not enjoy that, and recognise it's not healthy, and do not want to do that, but are pressured either by bosses or by work culture. And so this flexibility has been removed because some companies were not self regulating.
60 hours a week is 10 hours a day, with one day off. That doesn't include travel time. Let's say 30 minutes each way. Does it include lunch hours? (UK: No, but tea breaks are paid). Let's call lunch another 30 minutes. That's 11.5 hours a day. 7 hours for sleep makes 18.5 hours a day. That leave 5.5 hours a day (plus that one day off) for everything else; your parents, your partner, your children, your friends, your bills etc, your life.
What my country (Spain) labor legislation does, and I suspect many of the european ones, is not at all what you think it is, don't worry.
The law just allows workers, if they consider their rights to have been breached, to file a demand. It's somewhat complicated, because your employer, in principle, is still free to fire you when they want. In practice, employment here is and has always been, believe it or not, at will. What dismissal is not is "free as in beer": without a good cause (wrongful dismissal), they will have to pay you some quantity of money. With a good cause, it's disciplinary dismissal, which is free. That's true in all but a few cases, which protect you from wrongful dismissal. Say, you're the union's representative, or your son has cancer.
So you can demand to have your dismissal count as wrongful. You're still fired, but at least you get some extra money, including all extra hours, which have to be paid when demanded. If your employer threatens you with dismissal if you don't work 50 hours/week, then dismisses you, the judge could make it void and file a civil suit for threats, so there's still that protection.
But the catch is, no one can force you to enforce your rights. No one can demand your extra hours (any over the standard 40) be paid to you. Workers are still free to kill themselves on insane hours, if they want. In fact, because of ignorance of labor laws and fear of being fired, it's actually pretty common to do so.
Some fast food workers were expected to turn up for work, and when the restaurant wasn't busy they'd have to clock out, but stay in their waiting room until they got busy, when they'd have to clock in.
That counts as work under the EWT. Any time you have to be on the premises, counts as 'work' under the EWT Directive.
As someone who did that for a longer strech of time last year, because of starting a company, organizing a conference in parallel and socializing within the local programming community: it sucks you out. Not physically, but mentally, because all you do is "work". Worse: you get used to that state.
I still do that from time to time if things just cannot be pushed, but in very short spans.
I should say that I consider all my learning endeavors "free time", so its not like I just watch TV after work. I just don't do any business work.
As a sidenote, I had the most productive time in my life when I was working in France, 35 hours a week. As someone used to 40 hours, I always felt like I shouldn't waste any minute to get my stuff done :).
So the OP says '60 hours can be done, under some circumstances'. Then you come in and say '100 hours doesn't leave you with a life'. I don't have a stake in this discussion, I don't care - but I hope you see the flaw in your response.
The flaw is that the OP doesn't count the actual time involved.
Thinking that working 7-7 means you're home and having a family life for the rest of the time is incorrect.
Working 7am - 7pm translates more to 5am - 8pm. Just like working 9-5 means 7am - 6pm.
Thinking that you will only spend 1-2 hours at the weekend "checking email" is also incorrect. You may spend that much time reading email, but you're going to be spending much more time actually responding to it and checking up on anything required.
Seriously man, as my nan used to say - "When you're in a hole, stop digging". They guy says "spend 2 hours on the weekend", to which you reply "you can't stop at 2 hours", yet at the same time you try to defend working only 40 hours? How inconsistent is that? The OP sketched out a baseline scenario, and you're saying "yeah but if you change assumptions, your conclusion doesn't hold!". No shit Sherlock? Perfectly valid and reasonable observation: "Yeah it is safe to drink 2 glasses of beer." You: "BEER IS EVIL! IF YOU DRINK 25 GALLONS YOU'LL DIE!" O RLY, who woulda thunk?
You've got only 1 life, and even among a pool of the most bright, hardworking people (take a sample that works as many hours as you like), there's only so many Bill Gateses. I'm thinking just one.
Even after all his success, I wouldn't be surprised if a guy like that now regrets some of how he spent his youth. I'm sure he could have done it just as well and been a little less crazy, had some more time outside the office. I'd be surprised if a rational person wouldn't admit that.
Passion and determination are fine, but your idea (or my reading of it, anyway) that places outside the Bay Area are less worthy because they've got fewer kids willing to waste their life away ... it seems pretty low.
I just find it amazing that Steve Jobs, who could have retired multiple times over, was still spending 10-12 hour days at the office, on a consistent basis. This was at the expense of spending time with his family.
I understand passion but balance is important in life.
Is anyone interesting in working on a long term project to change the laws about the computer professionals exemption from being paid overtime? Drop me a note johnk@riceball.com
I recently had a phone interview that went rather well for a very interesting position but the company asks a minimum of 45 hours per week and that is a deal breaker for me.
I manage full-time contractors who can work any hours they choose and have an endless stream of work. Many of them are paid 4-5x average pay for their countries. I've noticed that most of them end up working 30 hrs/week. They're required to stop tracking time for every break, verified by cam/screen shots. Additionally, many end up taking on a second job. I wonder if that's because they can extend their productivity by doing completely different things.
The problem is corporate culture and chasing secondary indicators of productivity (hours spent in the office, lines of code written, emails sent). The actual output of knowledge workers is hard to determine and bursty (you can spin your wheels on a problem for days but have a break-through in minutes) so people come to rely on these proxies.
I don't even think the problem is employers [in Silicon Valley]. Employees themselves, unaware of how best to show their worth, choose to optimize for these proxies because it's perceived as a safer bet.
That said, I think when I've worked 80 hour weeks before I've gotten twice as much done as 40 hour weeks, but only because I felt driven to produce a certain output, not because I cared about the hours.
Oh how I wish I could settle down to 40 hours a week.Im actually looking forward to it. Currently work about about 60, and thats without counting the extra work I do on weekends. Anybody got a remote position for a Python guy? :)
This is a year old post although the title is very attractive. Does anyone now a newer, more comprehensive and scientifically solid article having the same claim?
> Does anyone now a newer, more comprehensive and scientifically solid article having the same claim?
As to "scientifically solid", you may be reaching beyond the plausible. Such studies are in the domain of sociology, and sociology is less scientific even than psychology (in fact, sociology is located at the very bottom of the science heap). One reason is the fact that you can't run controlled experiments with such luxuries as control groups and experimental discipline.
Thanks, you're right. What I really meant was something backed by data. This is more about business management practices or motivational psychology and "optimum working hours" must be a well studied topic. There must be more than some weak anecdotal arguments about Sheryl Sandberg or Ford Motor Company in early 1900s.
There was a presentation given by a programmer that looked at the research. I seem to recall that 40 hours was optimal for manual labour but it was actually less for mental work like programming, but the real kicker was it compared actual productivity with self-perceived productivity and claimed that you felt like you were making progress even when you weren't.
This isn't the presentation I was thinking of, but it covers similar ground (and quotes 35 hours as the optimum for brain-based work):
You can check out a few classics on developer productivity: Frederick Brooks' "Mythical man-month" and Tom Demarco's "Slack". As far as I recall, they both go into concrete data about the productivity drop-off that ensues after +40 hours for extended periods of time.
If you want a book full of studies on this very topic -- many of which show the perils, yes, of trying to do non-manual-labor for extended hours -- get the book Be Excellent at Anything, which is a misnomer. The book used to be titled The Way We're Working Isn't Working, and it was a huge overview of studies that show, well, the way people are working isn't working.
