

Why Going Home at 5:30 Brings in Top Talent - tablet
http://www.fastcompany.com/3008553/takeaway/why-going-home-530-brings-top-talent

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shaggyfrog
> Like many super-successful execs, he goes home, has dinner with his wife and
> kids, and then works in the late evening.

This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here,
if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely
as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different
than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful
exec" that he does extra hours?

~~~
kamaal
To be very honest with you, if you are claiming you did some thing spectacular
working 9 hours/day in software. You are either really a super developer or
you are cheating some way.

~~~
dscrd
9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by
studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker.

So if you're working over 6 hours/day, you are most probably wasting your
employer's time and your own life. Infrequent longer streches of work are a
different thing, of course, they work, but they need to be countered by
vacation time which brings the average to about 5-6 hours /day anyway.

~~~
kamaal
>>9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by
studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker.

May be, but nearly every successful person I know falls into two basic
categories.

1\. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job
done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of
turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating.

2\. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes
it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day.

I haven't seen any exceptions to these scenarios.

You can point factory assembly era type studies, where incentives for both
succeeding and failing are none. The rewards are very linear to efforts. And
you get only incremental hourly income for more effort. Obviously in such
cases productivity will fall with extra working hours. Because motivation
falls, the person begins to associate working extra with slavery and being
paid bones for slogging to make somebody else rich.

But if the reward and work relationship is non-linear. And you get good enough
money for taking a risks and working real hard. The motivation peaks and
corresponding work done and profit from that rise.

~~~
michaelochurch
_1\. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job
done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of
turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating._

OK, lesson time. There are people who make corporate social climbing a full-
time job. Their code (if there is any) isn't great. They don't have real
software accomplishments. Yet they rise. It has nothing to do with what they
build, because they don't build anything. They take a lot of credit and endure
(or call) a lot of meetings. That's a fundamentally different game from
building software.

 _2\. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want.
Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day._

You don't have to work 70-hour weeks to make things that people want.

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blindhippo
How sad is it that this article needs to exist?

It boils down to one final sentence: "The Takeaway: If you create a company
that encourages people to lead full lives, you can land a full roster of
talent."

Or translated: treat people as... PEOPLE and you can hire people!

Are management drones really that incompetent that they need this explained to
them? (rhetorical - clearly the answer is yes)

~~~
potatolicious
It's unfair to blame this on management drones - this propensity for mindless
overwork is a key component of geek culture. We brought this upon ourselves,
in many ways, though unscrupulous companies certainly have taken advantage of
it.

How many other fields and subcultures glorify and celebrate caffeine-fueled
binges and lack of sleep? How many subcultures _form competitions_ around how
horribly you can abuse your body for nerd points? Hell, as a nerdy kid growing
up, how many of your fellow nerds shunned you for daring to branch out and do
non-nerdy things on the side? For a bunch of ostracized people we sure as hell
do a lot of it on our own.

This translates not just to big companies but to founders too. There is a
pernicious perception that if you're not mindlessly devoted at all hours of
the day (waking or otherwise) to your startup/work that you are unworthy.

The geek subculture has never really known moderation. It's sad that this
article needs to exist, but bad management is really only the surface. This
goes pretty deep.

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tablet
We had 40-hrs work week rule from day 1 (well, nobody followed it in the
beginning though). Now we have 50 people on board and it is really important
to maintain a good balance to keep energy. So we have 4 working days and 1 day
(Friday) dedicated to learning and personal projects. We have no overtimes for
years. It is an incredibly rare event.

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rejschaap
"[H]e goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late
evening."

So basically he gets a small break to have dinner and then goes back to work.
That's not really what the title is suggesting. Not sure what the article is
trying to suggest. Eat your veggies?

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henrik_w
Working more than 40 hours a week doesn't mean you are more productive. See
"Bring back the 40-hour work week"
[http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...](http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/)

~~~
kamaal
Unfortunately there are tons of examples which say otherwise. Nearly every
start up is an example of this.

Working a lot, gets a lot of work done. Ofcourse you need rest and recovery
time to time.

But on an average a guy who does 16 hours/day will inevitable achieve more
than somebody who does 8 hours/day.

Don't look too surprised if that happens.

~~~
henrik_w
Are they successful _because_ they work 16 hours/day, or _despite_ working 16
hours/day?

~~~
Jgrubb
Maybe they work 16 hours a day because they are successful.

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victorology
Would be interested to know how many people leave work at 5:30 but do extra
work after hours.

~~~
Peroni
Prior to accepting the role I'm currently in I had a prerequisite that I get
to finish at 4.30PM on the button every day without fear of reprisal as it
enables me to spend at least an hour with my son every evening before he goes
to sleep. Once he's down I usually get one or two more hours of work in before
I spend quality time with my wife.

I have a lot of respect for people who work 60/70/80 hours a week however to
some (myself included), quality time with my family is infinitely more
valuable than anything any employer could ever offer.

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nugget
In my experience top talent is available pretty much 24/7. Not necessarily in
the office, but "always on". In order to really climb up the ladder, they
incorporate work into almost every part of their lives, and most of them seem
to enjoy it.

~~~
blindhippo
Bit of a misnomer - talent is not directly tied to hours spent working,
especially in knowledge industries.

This simple, basic fact escapes most of our industry managers who still use
management practices developed a century ago to manage steel mills.

So yes, we may be "always on" but that means inspiration and thought could
come at any time.

------
hawkharris
Normally multimedia adds to an article, but I thought the formatting in this
story was distracting. It broke up the flow of reading, especially because the
text was short and the TL;DR explanations were as long as the text itself.

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drorweiss
With 2 young daughters, for me it's usually:

9-18:00 working

18:30-21:00 dinner+bath+bedtime story

21:00-22:00 ~ free time

22:00 - 00:30 - second shift @work (from home)

~~~
andyjohnson0
Eleven and a half hours a day is a lot of time. Are you an employee or a
business owner?

~~~
drorweiss
Startup founder :)

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michaelochurch
I'm a believer in the 3-hour work-day. "4-hour work week" is impractical for
most jobs. 40 hours is a reasonable average, but expecting anyone to put in an
8-10 hour contiguous block (that often ends up being ~11, including commute)
is inhumane. Why, on the one 55-degree, sunny day in January that (by the
weather's lack of concern for us) lands on a Tuesday, should people be stuck
inside during that four hours of nice weather?

At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First
priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment
from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts
slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working
9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still
working at a sustainable pace.

However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software--
and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill
to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave _the
office_ before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her
stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect
direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than
15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking
to learn more.

I'd also have:

* an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.)

* 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.

~~~
WA
If I was working for you, I'd wonder why I should put my interest in CS /
software in the hands of your company. If the necessary minimum to work for a
paycheck is 3 hours per day, I'd work 3 hours per day and spend the rest of my
time doing my own projects at home or in a place of my choosing.

This has at least two advantages:

\- I get the benefits of whatever I create (e. g. sales)

\- I choose the projects that I want to work on and I never ever have to
justify anything to anyone.

Your plan works only if people are as passionate about the stuff your company
does as you are without having any interest in pursuing their own ideas.
Developing own ideas in a company environment and outside of it are two
entirely different things.

I believe employment ends up in a Nash Equilibrium. The most rational thing to
do for an employee is to work the minimum amount of time required for a
paycheck (and considering working overtime mostly for career advancement). For
an employer, the rational thing to do is to somehow "motivate" people to work
more on company-related stuff, because it makes the company more money.

~~~
quesera
I think you answered your own question.

To align interests, you give employees a meaningful ownership stake, or at
least profit-sharing. If you hire people who are already interested in your
field/industry, you make it easy for them to put their best efforts toward
your shared goals.

This isn't sneaky. Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be
rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks
personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.

Offer a good balance, and remember that regardless of what you _require_ from
your staff, they always _volunteer_ the most important parts.

Hiring is hard, and these kinds of conditions make it even harder. But getting
it right is transformative.

~~~
michaelochurch
_Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success)
but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial
work of a business by themselves too._

Exactly. If you're older than 25 and it's no longer socially acceptable to
mooch, you recognize that personal financial risk is toxic sludge to be kept
out of your life if at all possible.

Why do people take it on when forming businesses? They have no other choice.
Bank loans require personal liability, VCs run a reputation economy that's
almost certainly illegal.

However, you can give people an environment where they can be truly
"intrapreneurial" (this doesn't work in most companies for political reasons,
but it can in an open-allocation environment where doing work is more
important than controlling it) and participate in the upside (profit-sharing,
bonuses, increasing interestingness of work) partially but don't have to take
on any personal risk. People won't leave such an environment lightly.

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cheez
> I was able to get her because she was four months pregnant

I love that this is the thing that sold her on his company.

Let's be honest though, the vast majority of businesses are hard, tedious
work. Not many founders are smart enough to work smart and so they just work
hard. This is why pregnant women get treated as untouchables and it's not
their fault, it is the business's fault for being unable to develop the right
model.

The knee-jerk reaction by feminists would be to legislate this away but you
are more or less asking for businesses to go out of business by hiring
employees that are overpaid relative to their coworkers. Productivity cannot
be provided by JUST the employee, the business needs to help as well and most
do not.

