

Ask HN: "Send people home at 5." Was this part of Re-Work to be taken literally? - vignesh343

My last post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468545) was a lightning rod for valuable commentary and I learned a lot from this community. I, along with my business, have matured considerably since (and in some ways because of) that post. I'm hoping this post will spur an equal amount of interesting debate on this forum and hopefully less haters of the poster.<p>In my copy of the book (http://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;qid=1310709764&#38;sr=8-1), the section in question is on p. 258. The section seems to be pretty serious about exclusively promoting an office environment that closes up shop at 5 PM. Given that my team's average arrival to the office ranges from 11 AM - 2 PM and average departure ranges from 6 PM - 2 AM, I'm put in a bind here. I'm trying to reconcile the advice I received from this forum in that post and the advice in this book.<p>In that post, the community overwhelmingly encouraged flexible (and self-selected) hours for developers if at all possible. It was possible and I made it happen. Everybody got along better respecting each other's own selected hours rather than being forced to conform to uniform working hours.<p>The book does point out some interesting side-effects of long hours such as "it lets you get away with lousy execution" and "you don't need more hours; you need better hours". I can say that both of these are valid statements given my (limited) experience. While I initially felt that self-selected hours were better across the board, I'm now starting to have second thoughts on the matter.<p>To me this begs the simple question, should this 1 page chapter be taken literally?<p>-Vignesh
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brudgers
"Send people home at 5" is a metaphor for a humane workplace that values a
balance between worklife and personal time - and importantly, requires people
to take the time to achieve that balance. The degree to which it should be
taken literally is the degree to which your office runs 9-5.

Based on the description of your workplace and if you want to follow the
advice, it could be "Send people home after eight hours," because it looks
like you have people regularly working 12 or more hours. Of course, that is
easy to do in industries where the work is creative and the project is done
when you run out of time.

Salaried compensation facilitates overwork because the feedback loop doesn't
contain measurable consequences until staff get fed up and quit. But it
doesn't have to be that way. If you want a feedback loop which forces
management to take a real interest in long hours, put everyone, including the
CEO on hourly compensation - I have a friend whose architecture firm did that
years ago. They maintained very high retention through the construction boom
when job hopping was common and salaries were rising because people
appreciated the inherent fairness and management was able to add staff
appropriately.

Good luck.

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davidw
If it's working for _you_ , with the people you actually have, why listen to
some random business book?

Maybe if you're successful you can write your own business book, promoting
what happened to work for you as business advice with "clarity, even
genius":-)

You should come up with a catchy buzzword, say "time-distributed". "We're a
time-distributed team, and that has lead directly to our success because
....".

On a more serious note, it's good to see you resolved your problems and are
making progress.

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invalidOrTaken
Hackers have two reasons for staying up late working, and both of them are
because they couldn't get the work done during the day:

1) Distracting work environments. One person commented on your last post and
advised you to read Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, so I won't tell you
to do that. But be aware of it. A door that closes, quiet neighbors, few
meetings.

2) Guilt/determination. If a programmer for whatever reason is having trouble
making progress during the day, but is dead set on shipping, they may stay up
late to try and make it up. This is a good thing for you as a stakeholder,
because it means they care. It's a bad thing because something is holding them
back. Usually this thing holding them back is _some repeated obstacle that
drains their willpower_. That can be a variety of things: bugs when you have
bad debugging tools, figuring out how to do something without quick-feedback
access to documentation/expertise, running tests when there's a twenty-second
compile cycle that has to complete first, working hard to add a new feature
and then losing it because your computer freezes and you don't have version
control, etc. Note that 1)is actually a subset of this, as it's "getting your
brain ready to code only to have it interrupted often," but since you can
probably control 1) directly I gave it its own listing.

#2 can be hard to tackle. How are you supposed to find better debugging tools
as a non-technical business guy? And how are you then supposed to go about
telling your tech cofounder how to do his job? I don't know what the answer
is. Likely it's that you should buzz off and go do customer validation or
whatever. But maybe not.

In general, I agree with Rework on the early-to-work-early-off-work schedule,
but the way to achieve it is to figure out the reasons the night owl thing
happens and address them, rather than to try and force everyone in the 9-5
bucket. Shape the peg to the hole, THEN put it in.

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arkitaip
I think the point is that people should have sane office hours, that any
software firm that default to overtime is up to no good. Also, I don't think
having flexible hours is an issue according to 37signals as they have staff
located in different countries.

Also, may I suggest that instead of focusing on top-down business principles
you should be more product and customer centric and design your dev process
around these aspects of your business? If your product or customers require x
of you and your staff, then do x, otherwise don't. Deciding on office hours or
how many office hours staff should work without a rationale risks creating
bureaucracy and a sense of arbitrary decision making.

------
hluska
First off, great work on making some progress.

However, just because you are 'the business guy' (to quote your previous post)
doesn't mean you have to micromanage trivial details like hours of operation.
Rather, I think that your role should be more big picture - figure out what
customers want, how much they will pay, and how you will reach them.

Finally, this is not intended to be an insult, merely my own opinion. If I
were your co-Founder, I would be looking to jump ship and do something else.
In my experience, nothing kills morale faster than micromanagement. And
nothing kills a startup faster than killing morale.

------
Mz
_The book does point out some interesting side-effects of long hours such as
"it lets you get away with lousy execution" and "you don't need more hours;
you need better hours". I can say that both of these are valid statements
given my (limited) experience. While I initially felt that self-selected hours
were better across the board, I'm now starting to have second thoughts on the
matter._

There are pros and cons to anything. Just make sure you have your eye on the
prize and not on some proxy for it that you think is what is needed. In other
words, if someone is putting in long hours to get the job done because they
aren't staying adequately focused, work on the focus piece of it rather than
on a specific time frame to work in. And don't forget that we are all human
and no matter how much you do right, sometimes someone will be short of sleep,
under the weather, distracted by a personal issue, etc. If it is short term,
just be tolerant and supportive. If it is chronic, work with them to try to
resolve things (or, if intractable over a long enough period of time, consider
letting them go).

Different people work best in different conditions. Developers are often
introverts and will tend to not be real happy campers when having to be
surrounded by people and putting up with their chatter and general
distraction. My ex and my youngest son are both seriously introverted and we
homeschooled. I was the family extrovert. My computer area was in the middle
of a high traffic zone where everyone could interpret me to talk to me. I
handled it fine. The two extroverts had desks in secluded corners of the
apartment where they could turn their back on the world and also shut the
door. So if you can arrange the physical space the right way, that might
resolve the need some people have for quiet and solitude in order to focus.
And this is not just a personality thing. Some types of work need some certain
environments to be done well. If you can't arrange the physical space to be
adequately quiet when all hands are on deck, then letting the developer stay
late is a timing option to address this issue.

In short, I think you need to do more analysis than what I see in your post.
You need to know more clearly what the problem is and you need to think more
broadly in terms of what your options are for addressing it. This isn't
necessarily just a question of "flexible schedule or fixed schedule".

Best of luck.

