
How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit - holman
http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/
======
rdouble
This was the norm for every startup I worked at.

However, in practice it meant I could come in sometime between 10am and 1pm
and then work late into the night. It did not mean I could start at 6am and
then leave at 2pm. Anyone leaving before 6pm would get suspicious looks, no
matter when they came in. Thus, it made no sense to ever show up before 10. It
would be interesting to learn when the 7am workers mentioned in the article
leave.

~~~
pjhyett
That is certainly not the case at GitHub. We don't care where or when you work
as long as the work gets done. If you're being guilted into staying later,
then the hours aren't actually flexible.

------
seebq2
Great post. Hours are bullshit because "measuring hours" is a proxy for
results, and a bad one at that.

At Highgroove, we're a ROWE -- a Results Only Work Environment. We have no
hours, and our vacation policy is two words: "Be Reasonable."

This is actually a lot harder than having hours, because we have to define
what the results are, together (and top-down for some). For githubbers, those
results might be tangible things like: "Release 3 new Features a Week." or
"Blog once a day."

Without those tangible results (instead of just tracking hours), you risk the
sludge from others who are able to get more work done in less time -- and
alleviate the worry that even good workers have: "Am I working hard enough?"

Good stuff! I'd be curious to hear how those "managers" you allude to are
handling the "flexibility" you guys have in your next articles.

------
billybob
I don't think this is black and white.

If you hire a contractor, you're paying for the accomplishment of a task. If
you hire someone full-time, you're paying for... what? Not X hours, maybe, but
not "whatever you feel like doing," either. Something more like "your best
efforts in a reasonable work week."

If you hire a contractor to accomplish X task for $Y, you don't care if it
takes them 2 hours or 50, as long as they meet their deadline.

If you hire a full-time developer and that person accomplishes in 3 hours a
week what others do in 40, you'd be impressed. But you'd probably also be
frustrated. Imagine what they could be doing for you if they worked the rest
of the week!

Even if you're not a stickler about hours, you want people to be giving you
their best effort. If they say they can do that in 5 intense, randomly-
scheduled hours a day, and they deliver, great. But if they work 5 hours a
week, it's unlikely they're giving you their best.

~~~
dman
Flip side - If you were paying them 13 times as much you would be paying them
what the market would bear in terms of work output. If you are paying them
just what you are paying everyone else its unlikely you are giving them your
best.

~~~
billybob
That's true, but imagine your employees started working only as many hours as
they __felt __they were being paid for.

If the employee feels underpaid, they should renegotiate or, failing that,
leave.

~~~
masklinn
> That's true, but imagine your employees started working only as many hours
> as they felt they were being paid for.

Why would that be a problem, as long as what they feel they're being paid for
matches their actual productive output?

> If the employee feels underpaid, they should renegotiate or, failing that,
> leave.

The situation you talk about does not necessarily mean they're underpaid. If
they do the job they're paid for in half a week, why could they not have all
their afternoons with their children, or working at the gym, or going to the
beach? Or have 4.5 days weekends? Working 60, 70 or 80 hours a week is not a
goal in and of itself, and money is not necessarily the main sticking point
and the only valuable result of a job, and if you feel they don't work enough
you should renegotiate.

~~~
billybob
"Why would that be a problem, as long as what they feel they're being paid for
matches their actual productive output?"

My point is not "it is not OK for someone to work 5 hours a week." If both
employer and employee __agree __to that, it's fine.

The point is, if you hire someone full-time for $X, you probably expect
something like 40 hours a week out of them. If they just stop showing up 4
days of the week without talking to you, it's the same as if they somehow
managed to withdraw 5 times their salary from your bank account without
talking to you.

~~~
masklinn
> The point is, if you hire someone full-time for $X, you probably expect
> something like 40 hours a week out of them.

Then you'll get 40 hours of physical presence instead. I'm sure that'll go
well.

> If they just stop showing up 4 days of the week without talking to you, it's
> the same as if they somehow managed to withdraw 5 times their salary from
> your bank account without talking to you.

No it's not, as long as they're doing the job they're supposed to do in full.
That's like saying the guy who runs a 100m in 8s is a thief, and should run
the whole 10s. It's retarded.

------
jwdunne
Many people have the joy of flexible hours. Many people can have the luxury of
working from home. It sounds awesome but it seems like for many this is just
not an option. The only way out would be to quit the job and start your own
company or move to the areas where jobs are like this: in ships like mine,
this can be quite infeasible. This is more an office politics issue but I'd
probably be laughed out of the door if I said I wanted to work x - y.

In terms of productivity, hours are indeed bullshit. Hours don't mean
productivity or anything like that. Some days I can get stuff done in one hour
which could take two in my low days.

I will tell you that hours are not meaningless though. In some instances,
they're not bullshit. The hours I work, for example, often determines the
hours I sleep at night. This isn't because I'm actively reducing the amount
hours I sleep but because I just can't sleep knowing that I face any work not
completed during the day plus another pile of work tomorrow.

This isn't a rant against my job, I love my job, but it just isn't practical
to just work when I feel like I'm good enough to work. I have an employer
who'll strictly forbid such things and, in all honesty, I can see where he's
coming from: I share an office with other employees who require a rigid
structure and definite times - waltzing in at 3pm would be quite unfair in
their eyes and would cause undue headache.

~~~
gte910h
Sounds like you need to be paid tons more than that guy, or he needs to be
replaced.

------
mingyeow
I agree that hours are bullshit, but I have always found a morning standup to
coordinate goals and objectives to be exceedingly useful. But i often run into
opposition by the "free and easy" types. Thoughts?

~~~
addandsubtract
Solution: have standup meetings before lunch. Everyone wants to go to lunch,
so by doing a standup meeting beforehand, you'll be sure to keep it short and
to the point. Plus it can be extended into lunch if needed.

------
rdl
If you're an entrepreneur or founder and involved in meeting with customers,
vendors, partners, employees, etc., it's even worse than for a startup
employee or purely engineering person.

I can only count on 0500-0800 or so and weekends as productive time every day.
Given that I foolishly am living in Oakland for the summer, and working mainly
in MV and SF, I've got an hour commute, and lots of customer, partner,
investor, etc. things from ~0900 to ~2130 on various days. If you prefer
working in 3-4h unbroken blocks, good luck! Most days there is another block
sometime during the day, but it's really easy to have a day where there are
meetings or other events every couple hours, so you can spend an entire day
working on this kind of stuff.

Hence, why it is really useful for a startup to have multiple founders.

------
evilduck
How does this work honor system handle abuse? Does peer pressure mostly
prevent it? Are people fired faster or for less wrongdoing? I know GitHub
tries to only hire "the best", but it just seems like an eventuality before
someone slips through and throws a wrench in the works.

~~~
etruong42
It boils down to judgement of character. The standard fare of working 9-to-5
is open to abuse as well if HN or the like is not blocked.

------
cycojesus
This looks all great and all, but this

    
    
        Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with
        those hours being even more productive. Working weekends
        blur into working nights into working weekdays, since
        none of the work feels like work.
    

give the feeling that the company really wants to own the employees, make sure
that whatever the employee is doing it will benefits the company. How as an
employee can I ever build a healthy life balance? I know my contradictory
would feel pretty pissed having that nagging voice over my shoulder telling me
"You are happy now, it is for the greater good of the Company."

/paranoid-rant

------
nplusone
I wonder how many people who paraphrase Taylor's "Principles of Scientific
Management" have carefully read it. Taylor exposes several insights that are
antithetical to the commonly paraphrased version "Faster is better. More hours
are better."

At least in the context of moving pig iron slabs, he observed that highly-
qualified (for the job) and better-paid workers produced better results
working fewer hours than less qualified workers working longer hours.

This point is perhaps better paraphrased as "better management, better
workers, fewer hours, and higher pay produce measurable improvements in
output."

~~~
holman
I have. :) I was more using Taylorism as an example of the notion that he came
at it from a physical standpoint: if someone goes to work at the metal
factory, their mood has less impact on their productivity than we do at a
small startup, because they can still leverage their physical training and
muscle memory (if we're talking an extremely routine process). Certainly an
over-simplification of his work, of course, but a decent enough allusion for a
short introductory paragraph. :)

~~~
curyous
I find it hard to believe that you have read it, I have too. A common tactic
of his was to reduce hours to increase total output - you are agreeing with
him.

A great example of this is where he employed a foreman for the sole purpose of
enforcing rest periods. Forcing the workers to rest for 56% of the day -
resulting in a 4x increase of output.

------
BrettLSchuchert
I'm old enough that I want to say stuff like: well some people have families
and such, essentially "get off my lawn", but everything in this blog rings
true to me.

When I was young, I essentially had 2 jobs at one place. There were the
billing hours that kept us in business and the after-hours stuff were I really
learned stuff. I was single and I spent many hours arguing/practicing/learning
from my peers. This was not like the situation described at github. If I
consider the billing hours and the other stuff, I generally worked more than
40 hours. But the "other stuff" was fun, it was me geeking out. When I was not
on assignment I did more of the "other stuff."

Right now I have a bit of flexibility. I don't force myself to work at a
particular time, I find I do much better work if I do so when I feel like
doing it. I still have several jobs. I have my full-time job, where I have to
work hours. While I'm compensated like I'm full time, I am not 100% scheduled.
This gives me time to write, work on the side, watch topgear.

That is an interesting challenge. How can a consulting company that bills by
the hour not force a schedule? It turns out if you are a body shop, you've
unnecessarily coupled your organization to the implementation of the customer.
While that may be common, that doesn't make the "right" or "best", it's just
the shit companies do.

I hope you guys manage to find the right size that lets you keep this culture.
If you just try to do good stuff and enjoy yourself that's great. If someone
wants to sell the company or make lots of $$, woe be it to the employee.

Congratulations on having a great environment.

------
jdickey
On another note entirely: doesn't this tend to imply that cultural differences
can correlate pretty strongly with code quality? If you're in a place that
treats people as interchangeable parts that can get stamped into usable shape
with a little training and total direction from above, does it really matter
how talented an individual is?

He (and we're almost always talking about 'he' in this culture) will never
have the <i>chance</i> to shine; innovation can't fit into a structure as
tight as the one he has to operate within. And since there are often (read
"always, barring the occasional miracle") communication issues that impede
shared understanding, even the non-innovative work generally has to be done
several times before it's usable.

But since those tend to be the places where labour costs are lowest, they get
more work than they can handle from the guys like an ex-boss of mine, whose
desk sign read "We will pay any price to cut costs." Ultimately, the price his
company paid is called "bankruptcy".

------
wdrury
I first read about the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) in the book "Why
Work Sucks and How to Fix It" by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. The central
shorthand for breaking through to talking about results rather than attendance
as a measure of work is:

TIME + PHYSICAL PRESENCE != RESULTS

And yes, they do in fact agree with masklinn's comment that if someone can
finish their job in a few hours instead of 40, that the person is perfectly
free to take the rest of the time to do other (non-work) things. The job of
management is to come up with tasks that are important to the business, and
that justify the person's continuing to work there (aka results).

As for the "sucking", they go into it in detail in the book, but I also like
Paul Graham's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss".

<http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html>

Hmm. That probably seems like a suck-up, I just realized I am posting on HN.
:)

------
jwingy
I also agree that hours are bullshit. That being said, I wonder what are the
measures for results? Do some people actually end up less productive because
they feel the need to come up with something more tangible than say 'I helped
a co-worker learn a new programming language' or something of the ilk?

~~~
bkbleikamp
GitHub has erred on the side of hiring people who don't need measurement—we
all work hard regardless of who's watching.

Also, everyone is smart. No one is assuming number of commits is a correlation
to productivity. Some days sitting at home thinking about a problem is
productive.

I personally work more productive hours in a week at GitHub than I ever did at
a company where I was in the office 10 hours a day. But no one is counting
them.

------
mathrawka
My current job is similar to this, which I am glad because it shows that they
trust the developers to get their shit done.

Now, it is easy to abuse, but everyone knows who is abusing it because the
results of that person are not much. When not being in the office, it
compounds that impression even more because others are working hard and notice
when Bob is not around for a whole week and comes back with no commits.

I have also found out that I am more productive when working from home and in
the very early morning (3am - 8am). Combining the two increases my
productivity even more.

------
idoran
Part I agree and part I don't. chat with someone is never the same as sitting
face-to-face. When you talk with 3 or 4 people, chatting simply lose something
on the way. It start from simple response time that are much larger in chat
and go into much more. Measure hours as sign of productivity is never good,
but ignoring hours is bad as well. Estimate how long it will take you to
accomplish something is the hardest and very important quality of everyone
including developers

------
emils
Sounds like a dream but it's not for everyone. There are people who like to
have someon else setting up the rules/environment for them to feel
comfortable.

And how do you motivate collaboration?

~~~
sigre
Exactly. I imagine this breaks down when you have a designer that prefers to
work starting at 3pm, and a developer who's in at 7am. Do you allow the
deadline to slip, or ask the designer to come in earlier (or the developer to
stay later)?

I'm much more a fan of "core hours": i.e. a company that says everyone should
plan to be available between, say, 12 - 2pm either in person or online. Then
everyone can set their own hours around that.

~~~
aantix
The designer and developer are both professionals; they both have a mutual
problem to solve one of which it to make sure they're both on the same page of
logistics and design.

If they can't figure out that they have to meet together at some point early
in the process, then I'd say you have a bigger issue.

The need to define core hours feels like a band-aid to a bigger issue.

------
joooh
Hm, startup programmers have no family? Wasting AM hours to sleep, when the
kids are in school/daycare, does not work for me.

------
bluehavana
This presentation has been around for a bit and points to actual research:
[http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-
pres...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-
presentation.html)

------
flabbygums
Where did you read Frederick Taylor say "More hours are better"? He advocated
getting the most done in the shortest time possible actually. This goes
against what he preached.

~~~
jdickey
+1 for that. I think if more people read Taylor and fewer read, say, Jack
Welch, then work would be a happier place. Because implicit in Taylor is that
you need to create the conditions that let your people get the most done in
the shortest time possible. That does NOT mean "tyrannical PHB cracking the
whip". The existence of a PHB in an organisation is a declaration that HIS
boss hasn't taken Taylor (or the boss' own self-interest) sufficiently to
heart.

------
zeit_geist
I like the idea, but I don't know how it could be applied to people working
part-time; say students or folks busy with their PhD.

------
puls
I look forward to parts two and three.

------
abionic
the whole confusion would arise of thinking developers as an Engineer or
Craftsman

