
Superheroes don’t work 90-hour weeks - pmoriarty
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42705291
======
pan69
At a startup I worked at previously we introduced head-space and heads-down
days.

Head space was an experiment where every fortnight, at Friday noon it was
tools down and do what ever you want. You were encouraged to go away from the
office. Ride your bike, have lunch with your wife/husband or family. What ever
you thought was giving you head space.

Heads down days were every Tuesday and Thursday of every week. This meant, on
those days no meetings. Work from where ever you want. Turn off Slack. Close
your email client. The idea here is "planned" uninterrupted time so you get
into the zone for a long stretch of time.

Edit: Oh. Forgot about this. The other Friday afternoon every fortnight we
would do "refactor" afternoon. It's were the dev team would come together and
refactor parts of the code base as a team. You would get to see parts of the
code you'd normally never work on and some really great discussions came out
of that.

~~~
maxxxxx
We had a proposal for meeting free days but then a lot of people got nervous
and it got reduced to a meeting free afternoon and then nothing. It seems a
lot of people ca't live without meetings. For me it was perfect though.

~~~
colordrops
Several positions involve interaction between people and organizations as
their main responsibility, such as HR, sales, pure management, etc. What are
they supposed to do on meeting free days?

~~~
kortex
Organize. Go through backlogs. Read reports. Learn what engineers are up to.
Meditate. People whose jobs are the non-programmatic glue in a company and
thrive on human interaction would benefit a lot from stepping out of their
domain in any number of ways, or destressing, sorting through their mind, etc.

------
harlanji
I keep getting the calendar used against me.

I'm super human by all honest measures, but management without fail starts
giving me guff about going to the gym and having lunches away from my desk. I
can venture into justifying that I don't use social or anything on the clock
which creates clear head space, etc etc, but it'd fall on deaf ears... I'm old
school like that.

But the calendar creates an attack surface. I don't want to work at such
companies, it's not always been that way, but it's been consistent across shit
rung startups.

Management wants me at my desk 12 hours a day and always on call, and makes
"jokes" about anything that I mark as time I want away from my desk. Often 2
hours discussions start 15 minutes before I have an outside event noted.

I quit these jobs when the abuse threshold is crossed, but the departments are
made up of mostly people on visas etc so they're not so lucky. It should never
strike management as a surprise when I leave, but I get the impression they're
used to dishing out abuse to "non-compliant" programmers. The bros thrive, the
meek get beat down and go home to lonely apartments full of cats where they
passionately code themselves to sleep with Netflix.

~~~
rublev
I quit when they expect me to stay beyond 5pm. It's software. It can wait more
often than not.

~~~
carlmr
I've found that a lot of problems solve themselves if you stay away long
enough. I can't count the number of times that some urgent issue came in when
I went on vacation and by the time I got back there were more emails saying
that it wasn't needed after all, or "nevermind".

------
m3kw9
There are not many people that actually work x hours even though they are at
the office for x hours. So when they say they work 90, does that mean they
actually is focused and doing actual work for 90?

~~~
toomanybeersies
I got down to 10 hours a week at one job. They never bothered to give me a pay
rise, so I continued to do the same quantity of work, and tapered down my
hours to compensate.

I never once heard them complain about my output.

~~~
kbart
That's my "secret" strategy too. I gradually lower hours I actually work and
spend remaining times learning new things so I can get a better job. Never had
complains too, so I see this as win-win situation -- employee get the work
they pay me for done and I don't feel too bad about not being compensated
enough. Funny thing though, every time I say I quit in such situation, I get a
counter-offer of similar size or even bigger.

------
twooclock
For everyone interested there's an excellent book on running a bussines called
Rework with exact same phrase "you're not a hero if you work long hours".

------
debt
If ya wanna see a hero go to the morgue.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?

