
The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek - itamarst
https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/16/sane-workweek/
======
patrickdavey
I went to a talk once on leadership. One of the suggestions was to get your
"go to hell kit" ready. That is, get enough money in the bank (whatever that
means for you) so that you can walk away if things cross your personal lines,
be they moral / work-life balance, whatever. It's a good thing if there's
pressure to work silly hours. In my first job (recent grad) before I left the
job, I'd been working 5 weekends straight (at least a Sat/Sun). Looking back,
insane, now I'd be having a conversation with my manager.

Sometimes it's hard when the "norm" is to work these extra hours. Where I live
now, I have worked a normal 8:45ish to 5:15ish and haven't had to stay late or
work weekends in years. It can be like that, I reckon it _ought_ to be like
that. If your contract says 40 hours a week, why would you work more? You're
just reducing your hourly rate. Now, I don't mind putting in extra effort if
needed, no worries, but if it's the culture that it's just long hours, well
that's crazy.

~~~
flanbiscuit
> You're just reducing your hourly rate.

This is how I've always explained to people who constantly work overtime in
salaried positions where they don't actually get paid for that overtime.

You can at look at it one of 2 ways.

1\. Your billable self stopped at the 8-hour mark on a given weekday and every
hour after that, including weekends, you're just giving away free labor to the
company. Just think about that every time you're working overtime, every
minute after 8-hours you're freely giving away to the company. This is your
personal free time.

2\. Or, like patrickdavey said, you dilute your hourly worth. Say you're a dev
who makes $90K, that's roughly $43.xx/hr for a 40 hour work week. But if
you're actually working 50hr work weeks you're now worth $34.xx, and so on.
The company just saved money on you (or they are making money off you).

~~~
ThePawnBreak
Do you also account for the fact that you are way more likely to be promoted
if you work overtime?

~~~
pjc50
Promotions are a myth told to people to get them to work harder, aren't they?
They're quite rare and usually come with moderate increments. Whereas the best
way to increase your salary is to move jobs. Salary is only vaguely linked to
job title.

(I was once promoted _en passant_ , when my first employer wished to inflate
the number of Senior Developers assigned to a consulting proposal...)

~~~
Practicality
I've never seen _en passant_ used outside of chess before. It makes sense
though, so long as he didn't capture you afterward.

~~~
pootsbook
What’s even better is that he did in a reply to a comment by _ThePawnBreak_.

------
antirez
I don't know what's the perfect amount of work every week, but I'm sure
anything > 40h is wrong, and you should add commute time if more than
30min/day, otherwise it's a fake figure. In 36-40h/week it's possible to do a
lot of things. If you can't often is not because of the time, but because the
same people wanting you to work more vaporize your time with meetings,
conference calls, emails, phone calls, at a rate that makes it impossible for
you to work. Or your coworkers are tempesting you with questions. Or your boss
is switching your goal every day not allowing you to produce properly. Or you
lack discipline to sit down and work instead of surfing random websites.
Anyway whatever the problem is, the solution is NEVER to work more than 40h.
Working more can just lead to a shitty life, depression, burn-out, and so
forth.

~~~
dx034
I wouldn't necessarily draw the line there. It always depends on your
situation. If you don't have a family, working 7.30am-5.30pm (my approx
working hours) 5 days per week still allows you to have enough time to spend
with friends and for side projects.

If your really dedicated to your project and have no family waiting at home,
why should you always leave after 8 hours? Sitting in front of the TV at home
isn't necessarily better than an interesting project at work. Will not always
be the case, so it's (in my opinion) completely normal to work longer during
some months of the year and shorter during others.

For me, flexibility is clearly more importan than working hours. It's great to
have a workplace where you can go for a long lunch once in a while or a
doctor's appointment without anyone raising questions. It's about being able
to make plans. If I know that I can go out for Dinner next Wed on 5pm then
it's no problem to work longer on other days. Not being able to plan this
sucks, no matter how much you actually work.

But I agree that if the work environment is unproductive, working more is
definitely not the solution.

~~~
kdamken
I hope you negotiated an appropriate salary for the extra 25% a week you're
apparently working as opposed to the standard 40 hours a week.

There are jobs with flexibility that don't require that amount of time.

~~~
dx034
No, I didn't negotiate a 25% bonus as I didn't choose the job based on the
salary. Of course I need a decent salary, but I took the job because I like
what I'm doing here and I'm fascinated by the work. Much of what I do now
during working hours was what I did before on side projects. It's fun for me
to work on it and the employer gives me flexibility to test my ideas. So both
parties benefit from this arrangement.

I wouldn't trade my job against a better paying job with strict 40h/week if I
don't like it as much. And I wouldn't want an employer where every working day
is strictly 9-5, no matter what project you're on or how the workload is.

------
makecheck
One red flag is this: does a company zealously track every hour of vacation
time but not even give you a _place_ to log overtime? These two things should
be treated with equal importance because they are fundamentally the same
measurement. If they expect you to take precisely 2 weeks of vacation a year
then be sure to reward them by doing precisely 8 hours of work each day. If
they have leniency in vacation, reward them with some leniency in when you are
willing to handle emergency situations.

~~~
triplesec
or four weeks' vacation in a jurisdiction with humane labour practices

~~~
adrianratnapala
I agree that 28 days is reasonable while 14 isn't really.

But if we start calling 14 "inhumane", then we are in danger of losing our
grip on what what inhumanity is. Which is to lose our grip on our moral
compass.

~~~
grecy
"inhumane relative to the developed world", then.

------
grecy
I think the easiest and most overlooked piece of advice revolves around cell
phones.

When you start a new job, under no circumstance should you give them your
personal cell phone number.

Tell them it's inappropriate, tell them it could turn into a conflict of
interest, tell them you don't have a cell (true for me), tell them you can't
afford a cell, tell them you can't afford roaming, tell them you only have
data, not a number, tell them anything you have to so you don't give them your
personal cell number. Don't ever, ever let them install anything on your phone
either, "BYOD" style.

Same applies for your home number, if you have one, and your personal email
address. Setup a different email and google voice number for the purposes of
interviewing, etc. Once you have a job, don't respond to it "real time".

Now, if they want you to have a work cell, they can provide and pay for it,
and _before_ you put a hand on it, you make them very, very clearly document
under what circumstances and times you are expected to answer that phone, and
what compensation you get for doing so. If they won't provide extra
compensation, you make it very clear your home commitments (kids, sick family,
make something up) are your priority, and you won't be taking that cell home
with you. Leave it in your desk drawer at work, turn it on at 8:30am and turn
it off at 5pm and leave it there.

If your employer won't accept that, find another one. Life is too short.

------
edw519
_Finally, you 'll need to have the self-confidence or stubbornness to choose
and stick to a path that most people don't take._

You don't need self-confidence or stubbornness, just commitment to your
principles...

I have _never_ worked more than 40 hours per week for anyone else. Ever. I
arrive at 8. I leave at 5. I don't work from home.

Except for emergencies.

My definition of emergency: If someone is dying or their production software
isn't working. That's it. Anything else, I'll be in all day tomorrow and will
be happy to talk about it then.

All you really need to do is reach an understanding with your manager about
your boundaries and the definition of "emergency" at the beginning.

If they want to pay 40 hours for more than 40 hours of work or have a
different definition of emergency, they I'll work somewhere else.

It's really that simple. I've been doing this for almost 40 years and have
never had a single complaint about it.

And I'm not sure which "most people" OP knows, but "most people" I know have a
philosophy similar to mine. We'll do whatever it takes to get the job done,
but we won't be suckers.

OP, do you really need a whole book for this?

~~~
happychappy
As a manager: If your code blows up in production on a Saturday afternoon, and
you don't answer email/skype/phone, you've effectively left me in the shit. I
know thats my job, and I will deal with it and survive, but your future work
is going to be very heavily scrutinized - borderline micromanaged - until I
trust you again

But the flipside, if your code blows up in production on a Saturday, and you
spend four hours of a weekend fixing it, I'll say take 6 hours off during the
week to compensate. I'd say take a day off, but our HR system will complain.

Aside from that, I expect 40 hours of "quality" braintime from you, and I
don't really care where or when those hours occur, as long as you're
collaborating with the team when they need you.

~~~
cookiecaper
Others are recording the need for a real on-call rotation, so I'll just jump
into this:

>Aside from that, I expect 40 hours of "quality" braintime from you, and I
don't really care where or when those hours occur, as long as you're
collaborating with the team when they need you.

There is no way you are getting 40 hours of "quality brain time" from anyone.
If you believe you are, you don't know what "quality brain time" is.

Assign the amount of work you feel is reasonable. Let the worker do the work.
If the work gets done, it doesn't matter how much time it took. Knowledge
workers sell their knowledge to help you accomplish a designated task, not
their time.

How much work really gets done in a 40-hour work week? Anyone who has been in
any office environment knows that probably at least 50% of that time is
_always_ just farting around trying to rack up butt-in-chair time. Consider
also that promotions and political favors are usually withheld from people who
do the "bare minimum" of 40 hours and that butt-in-chair time comprises 95% of
an external entity's (like, say, your boss's boss) assessment of job
performance, and the time constraints can become quite demanding.

We should do away with the Industrial-era culture of minutely managing hours
(when time working was directly correlated to the quantity of products a
company could assemble, and thus counting time allowed the company to
reasonably reliably assign a portion of the revenue to its employees) and
embrace the Information-era mandate of small, irregular work units moving the
majority of the product.

We should accommodate workers such that they can cultivate a fruitful and
creative mental state for use in employment when inspiration and flow is most
likely to strike (which, for coders, is usually in the middle of the night
when there is a solid block of 5-6 hours with 0 interruptions), instead of
forcing our supposedly-revered knowledge workers into deadened, drooling blobs
stuck to their chairs for 55 hours a week because they're vying for a
promotion next year.

It's a major pet peeve to see someone treating knowledge workers like assembly
linemen. More butt-in-chair time != more productivity, and in fact, once a
certain threshold is reached (probably ~20 hours), it becomes
counterproductive.

~~~
CodeMage
Before I dive into my comment, let me just state that I agree with you on the
impossibility of delivering 40 hours of "quality brain time" and on the
stupidity of measuring productivity in "butt-in-chair hours".

That said, I always get worried whenever someone starts advocating for getting
rid of 40-hour work week without a very clear idea of how to replace it in
concrete terms. See, maybe I'm cynical, but it seems to me that a lot of
people forget that the whole concept of 40-hour work week comes from a
compromise between the workers and the employers: it's supposed to mean you
can be expected to work _no more than_ 40 hours a week. Naturally, the
employer will expect you to work no less, otherwise they're "not getting their
money's worth".

Whether we like it or not, there is a power imbalance between workers and
employers and it's usually in favor of employers. I don't want to touch
sensitive topics of how that imbalance might be redressed, but as long as the
imbalance is there, having a fixed number of hours in a work week -- even if
that's only nominal -- is still better than getting rid of that and making
workers vulnerable to having their historically hard-earned rights eroded or
downright stripped away.

If that sounds too jaded and bitter, consider the "unlimited" vacation policy.
At best, it means you'll still take roughly the same time off as the rest of
the team. At worst, everyone ends up taking less vacation time than before and
the company profits because they don't have the financial liability of unused
vacations anymore.

~~~
grecy
> _Whether we like it or not, there is a power imbalance between workers and
> employers and it 's usually in favor of employers._

I wanted to chime in and mention this balance varies greatly by country. I've
worked in Canada, Australia, USA for years, so has my brother.

I personally feel in Australia the balance is clearly in favor of the
employee, in Canada it's over to the Employer and in the USA it's shockingly
(scarily) in favor of the Employer.

After 7 years in the USA and Canada my brother went back to Australia. One
month in I asked him what the most shocking thing was - what do you think he
said? Going from years of -30C winter to +40C summer? Driving on the wrong
side of the road? food? accents? Nope.

In Australia, you are a valued person at work, rather than a slave. I think
that says a lot.

------
krupan
Here's the somewhat passive aggressive approach.

1\. Make sure you either arrive at work before your boss each day, or leave
after your boss each day, or at least the large majority of days.

2\. A couple times a week answer an email or two during the evening or
weekend, preferably ones your boss will see. This doesn't have to take very
much time. Don't force it, make sure they are emails that you are actually
interested in and have a good response to.

3\. Work smart and hard when you are working, be above average on your team
despite probably spending less time in the office.

4\. Work longer hours than you normally do when it's something really fun and
you don't have much going on at home anyway. That situation does arise from
time to time. Make sure, in a very natural way, that your boss notices when
you do this, probably by telling him/her how fun it was.

5\. When you have to duck out for an hour or two for the dentist or whatever,
don't tell your boss unless you absolutely have to (e.g., you have to miss a
meeting with him/her). You are an adult, he/she doesn't need to know where you
are at all times. You don't ask permission to go to the bathroom, do you? In
short, don't emphasize to your boss, "I'm not going to be working for the next
little while" if you don't have to.

6\. Keep _all_ commitments that you make to be at work at a certain time. Try
not to make very many of those commitments. Instead commit to getting work
done, not just being somewhere.

If you are doing all that, you can work less than 40 hours most weeks and
nobody will care.

------
ryandrake
The "paths to a saner week" seem pretty simplistic and unrealistic. Want fewer
hours? Work fewer hours! Wow, you don't say?! That simple, huh? The quote from
the article is "you always have the option of unilaterally normalizing your
hours." Oh reeeeally?

Don't like your commute? Don't commute so much. Just snap your fingers and
afford to live closer to work! Got it.

Want a shorter work week? Just "negotiate" (word mentioned 9 times in the
story). Oh, silly me, I was forgetting all of that extra power most people
have in the employee/employer relationship!

Any advice for those of us living in the real world?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
If your employer expects constant overtime from you, start looking. When you
have an offer from a sane place in hand, quit your current job. On the way
out, _tell them why_. It might help the others who are still there.

In a world that complains about a shortage of programmers, you have more
leverage than you may think.

~~~
cookiecaper
There is risk involved in doing that. I've seen a lot of people come back to
their former employer after trying out a new place and not having it work out.
If you give a real accounting of your opinions in an exit interview, that
escape hatch from the new gig would probably close.

The amount of leverage you have is heavily dependent on the perception of your
bosses. If your bosses know how rare a good programmer is and truly do value
you, then you shouldn't have these problems anyway, and I'm sure they'd
rectify them ASAP if you brought them up. Many of us don't work for such
enlightened people, though.

~~~
imagist
Everything worth doing involves some risk.

------
jnordwick
I think it also depends on the industry and way you are paid. If you are
getting paid $100k doing simple web work, CRUD database stuff, JEE plumbing
type where, wiring together libraries with Spring, etc. then you are probably
going to complain about working more hours.

If you are getting paid $250k or $300k doing something highly interesting that
comes with tight deadlines like finance or trading, then you are going to push
yourself a lot harder.

And especially if much of your pay is bonus-based, you will definitely push
harder. For example, working in the front-office of a trading company where
even developers are getting paid mostly in bonus it is very common to put in
more than 60 hours a week. And people love it because the work it very
exciting.

One of the most important questions is do you love what you do. I love working
in front-office in finance, and i'll gladly put in plenty of hours, especially
since getting the promotion to director or principal carries a huge pay
increase.

I don't work for my current salary, I work for the next one. I don't do any
side projects because getting that next strategy or gateway up and running is
worth more than any project I could work on. My job is my side project. And I
really like it that way.

Instead of figuring out to only work so many hours, why not try to figure out
how to find jobs that excite you more. Find that field you really love and
that pays you well or find that startup where you can really see yourself
making a huge contribution.

~~~
shostack
Your point about comp is really important. In roles where I felt I was not
paid enough, and the pay was not life changing to begin with, I definitely
valued my work/life balance more. In roles where significant changes in
quality of life came from the job or comp, I pushed myself harder if it
materially improved my outcomes.

That said, if your goals are financial independence, everyone needs to do a
real reality check as to whether their current job (or even career path if you
are junior) will ever let you reach that with your target lifestyle. I know
people who love what they do, but the reality is I can't see how they could
ever retire with what they earn even with a relatively frugal lifestyle.

On the flip side, I have an ibanker relative who would be on track for
financial independence in his early thirties if only he didn't live an ibanker
lifestyle.

------
thedonkeycometh
I read up to the part where he said he worked at google, then shut my computer
down and jumped out of a window.

~~~
freyr
Could you explain?

~~~
initram
I've not worked at Google, but my guess is that:

1) Google is able to be flexible about many things that other companies are
not

2) If you work at Google, you have many job opportunities open to you that
others might not. So just leaving and finding or creating a job where you can
work fewer hours is much easier than someone working in a lower-end position
for a small company in a market with few opportunities.

------
_ix
Just put in my two week's notice yesterday. I've been putting in a stupid
amount of hours (80+) while my colleagues in other departments barely hit the
40 hour mark. This is a good omen.

~~~
muzster
Was that down to yourself or your employer ?

Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.

~~~
wccrawford
Does it really matter? Since he put in his notice, I don't think he'd have
worked 80 hour weeks if he didn't feel he _had_ to. Either way, he feels
pressured to do it and he is now out from under that pressure.

~~~
muzster
It does matter - we can fix self inflicted wounds a little easier than fix the
culture of an organisation.

~~~
_ix
A little of both, actually. There was never a requirement to work more than 40
hours. In fact, last Friday I talked about how I'd probably work through the
weekend to make the deadlines they set for the beginning of this week. They
took pity on me and said I shouldn't even be checking my email over the
weekend. I reluctantly agreed, and didn't work on the projects. But, guess who
everyone was angry with come early this week for not having the deliverables
to the clients?

~~~
muzster
Sometimes things need to fail to improve...

------
jefe_
Lots of work isn't always bad, but we move in the direction of where we spend
our time. First decide, where do I want to be in 1,3,5 years? Map your time
usage (including work & leisure), determine how much truly free-time you have
left and split it into 9. Spend 5/9 of free-time positioning for where you
want to be in 1 year, 3/9 positioning for where you want to be in 3 years, and
1/9 positioning for where you want to be in 5 years. If your 1,3 & 5 year
goals relate to climbing ladder at company you're in now, then your work weeks
may be many hours (Jeffrey Immelt of GE for example), if your goal is
successful completion of a project your managing due in 1 year, so you can
move to another company in 3 years and then do whatever after that, your
workweeks this year will be standard hours + 5/9 of your free time. The
further the goal, the less time you devote today, but if you devote no time,
the goal won't ever happen. This is the cost of leadership.

------
bikamonki
Where I live IT workers are not fairly valued, the average one can charge and
still get contracts is around USD $30/hr. As such, reducing working hours will
make it really difficult to pay bills (forget about early retirement). So,
instead of working less I work on developing products that bring in passive
income. These products are not the next ubers, just small B2B apps that serve
local/niche markets. I started this strategy a couple of years ago and now
half my income comes from _selling my time_ while the other half comes from
selling saas. Furthermore, time is limited so income from selling dev hours
can only increase if rates increase or if extra hands are hired. Selling saas
does not have this growth restriction.

~~~
shostack
Can you share some examples of these projects?

------
creullin
I think this really boils down to self regulation. In some/most cases no one
is forcing you to work 50+ hours a week.

I remember a sign a coworker used to have in his office. The gist is - are you
happy? If so, keep doing what you're doing, if not, change something.

------
gavanwoolery
I can't stress how important it is to cut commuting out of your life. I know
many people who commute an hour each way, each day. Two hours per day. ~500
hours per year. Thats 20 to 30 days of your life each year wasted commuting,
depending on whether or not you just count waking hours. And not only are you
not making money those hours, you are spending it - on gas, insurance, the
life of your vehicle, etc.

~~~
shostack
Last year I moved from 1.2 miles away from work with a ~10 min. door-to-door
commute whether I biked or drove, to roughly a 16 mile 30-45 min. commute each
way (depending on traffic) in order to buy a house, get more space, etc.

I desperately wish I had my old commute back, but am making the sacrifice for
the time being and enjoying the gorgeous drive home on 280 as the sun sets
while listening to some relaxing music or podcasts.

That said, the car maintenance costs have gone up, gas has gone way up, and my
free time has gone down. Those are all real costs. I did the math on them
before the move, but the real cumulative impact of the reduced free time was
something that didn't really hit me until I was doing it.

If only non-engineering jobs had as much flexibility with remote work.

------
kamaal
The problem is never more working hours. Nobody minds working extra hours as
long as they are paid for it.

The problem really is companies expecting people to do far more then anything
they are ready to pay for. Sometime its even more worse when a few people have
to make up for other people, and then watch the lazy group get rewarded better
for political reasons.

The real issue is resentment not extra working hours.

~~~
majewsky
> Nobody minds working extra hours as long as they are paid for it.

"As long as they are paid for it" may already be fairyland. A usual clause in
employment contracts for developers in Germany goes like "The salary is X per
month. Overtime is satisfied by this."

~~~
biztos
Don't larger companies in Germany usually do flex-time (Gleitzeit) for non-
management employees?

So, my boss can require that I work an extra 10 hours this week, but I need to
get it back at some point, right?

~~~
mschuetz
I know it as "Zeitausgleich". You don't get paid overtime but you accumulate
time off. Pretty much like getting additional vacation days. And to be honest,
I kind of like this system. I'm happy to work >40h every now and then, but I
won't work >40h on average.

------
zelos
What do people consider an average work week?

I do 37.5hrs religiously and have never had a problem. A good fraction of
developers at head office do 30-32hrs (4 days/wk).

~~~
biztos
I consider 40-ish to be "normal" but I don't always organize my time that way,
it's just some ingrained cultural thing because I'm from the USA.

When I feel like I'm working much less than 40, I check my productivity. If my
productivity feels good I stop worrying; if not then I try to work more. (I've
been in the game long enough to have a pretty good sense of this.)

When I feel like I'm working much more than 40, I worry about my time-
management and try to correct it.

I would find it completely reasonable for someone else to do the same
reckoning with 30 instead of 40 hours, as long as they get shit done.

On the occasions when I've found myself stuck in crazy ruts, like six months
at 80 hours per week, in hindsight it's always been because I followed some
wrong lead -- a workaholic boss, an arbitrary deadline -- that I didn't
actually have to follow.

------
contingencies
If your biggest concern with work is how many hours you are doing, then you
have bigger problems.

------
biztos
Does it count as irony that the only hope for a sane work week is coding
_with_ rules?

------
jnordwick
Let me come in with a contradictory opinion especially on the overtime.

You don't work for your current salary, you work for your next one. If you are
one of those 9 to 5 ers, don't complain when the guy working 60 hours and more
gets that promotion over you.

The higher up the ladder you go, the more that will be required of you. Also,
startups or high paying jobs will require more of you since you will get
getting more in return for better performance.

It is a trade off, and as you get older your priorities change. But there is a
trade off to be made. 60 hours is the norm in my field, and often I'll put out
more (including the random 2am call), and sometimes much more.

~~~
jnordwick
Why am I getting down voted for this?

~~~
mrweasel
While I didn't down vote, I would say: because you're wrong.

You seem to suffer from the delusion that number of hours a person works is
what matters. Most people aren't productive above 40 hours a week, any high
number of hours and you're just wasting time.

Then there's the fact that working 60+ hours of week simply isn't health, and
you're advocating that the thing you need to do to advance in the world is to
trade in health for promotions, and increased salary.

If a job requires a person to work 60+ hours per week, then may it should be
two jobs, not one. So now you're not just encouraging people so scarifies
health, family and friend for you job, you're basically under biding a another
person by doing their work for free.

Edit: May not wrong, but the advocate for a work environment that should be
illegal. In fact it is illegal where I live.

~~~
jnordwick
There are highly competitive fields where this is the reality. Those also tend
to pay very well and include large bonuses. And some of us like working in
those fields. We don't just work on web projects or droid apps.

~~~
mrweasel
That's hardly the point. The point is that if not regulated, at a level where
the average person can keep up, be healthy and have a life outside work, then
some employers will push and exploit people.

Also employees shouldn't be rewarded for self destructive behaviour. Sadly
many companies can't tell the self destructive from the people who just happen
to enjoy what they do. And some of the self destructive actually do love their
job.

