
An entrepreneur says 32-hour weeks ‘killed work ethic’ at his startup - FrankyHollywood
https://www.businessinsider.com/productivity-tips-four-day-workweek-2018-8
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alexgmcm
I always find it funny when there are so many articles about how CEOs etc.
work like 80+ hours a week.

It's very different sitting in meetings and organising the activities of other
for 80+ hours a week than it is writing bug-free (or at least relatively free)
production grade code.

Doing the latter for 80 hours is more likely to result in errors and mistakes
that will just cost more money and time to fix than has been saved.

I suspect the engineers at his startup still only do 32 hours of actual
focused work.

~~~
geezerjay
The CEOs I know spend much of their time socializing /networking either
through social media or on the phone. To them, having a fancy dinner with a
prospective partner is classified as working. No wonder some people claim they
"work" >80hours/week.

~~~
throwawaywewrok
The CEO of WeWork claims to work almost 20 hours a day in this video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tSINazw78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tSINazw78)).
Its impossible to do unless you are spending your time doing light work. Any
intensive work that requires brain power will burn you out after 10+ hours.
And to do it consistently day in and day out is impossible. I work 7 days a
week averaging 10+ hours a day. I can barely hit 18 hours doing straight
intensive work, and my day after suffers.

~~~
rando444
If a potential candidate tried to tell me that they had no problem and even
enjoyed working 20 hours a day, I wouldn't hire them because they are
demonstrating that they are clearly incapable of basic organizational skills.

~~~
rqs
Maybe the candidate just trying to show their passion and they just not
completely trusted you, so they're not sure about the answer.

Or the candidate may have just failed another interview hours ago because he
said he enjoyed working 8 or 12 hours a day, and lose the faith of humanity
all together.

You'll never know why they've generated that answer if you don't ask a follow
up question.

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Dunedan
The title sounds like it killed the work ethic of his employees, but a quote
from the interview makes it rather sound like it killed his work ethic:

> It created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental
> to the business and to our mission […]

I'd really like to know what he means by "lack of work ethic" and why he
thinks a 32 hour week contributed to that.

~~~
radoslawc
Exactly, I'm also not sure what's the problem. CEO had problem with 'work
ethic' (and I'd like to see explanation what that means) and brought back
five-days-a-week working scheme for all his employees? Or am I getting it
wrong?

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vesak
As a species, we have been moving towards "less hours, more work done" for
centuries. Just a few hundred years ago, most of humanity worked every waking
hour creating food for themselves in order to not die of starvation.

The logical end point of this progress is 0 hours work per year and we still
get everything we want. We're not quite there yet, but we're already much
closer to that point than "work all the time to survive".

We should do something about resource distribution, though. I'm not saying
that we would be there already if the 1% didn't steal everything, but we'd
certainly be closer. Not communism or anything close to that, though, we
already know that crap has no chance of working. But just something not quite
so unbalanced.

~~~
mojuba
How about: we have achieved the right work-life balance now with ~40 hours a
week as a species, a balance that allows us to be most creative. We don't work
to survive anymore (with the universal basic income on the horizon), we work
to show off our creativity. Take artists as an example, they don't reduce
their work load just because they can. I'm not even sure who spends more time
at work: a startup engineer or a [successful] musician.

So no, we'll always need room for creativity and show-off, whatever it takes,
be it 40, 80, or 30 hours per week on average throughout a year. And no, it's
not going to converge to 0 because it would mean pretty much the end of the
evolutionary path for our species.

~~~
majewsky
You're making it sound as though people are only allowed to be creative during
work hours.

I'm working 70% (28 hours a week) by choice because it leaves me ample room to
be creative _outside_ of work hours, on my own projects, outside of the logic
of profit maximization.

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ctack
“It created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental
to the business and to our mission”.

He as CEO took the 32 hour week and decided that it was bad for the run and
mill.

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xchaotic
Just because that particular CEO couldn't manage the 4day approach does not
reflect badly on the approach - it reflects badly on him. Other can make it
work, he can't. It doesn't mean that the approach is flawed.

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alanfranzoni
Maybe we should just stop focusing on how many hours we work, and concentrate
on what we want to do and on whether we've achieved it. I feel that not
focusing on the hours just works better.

One day I feel tired, and I'm not advancing? I go home. The next day I feel
energized, and I want to keep working? I can work 12 hours straight.

No limits, nobody tells me what I can or I cannot do, and when I should do it.

Of course, we may need a bit of tracking hours in order to understand what
we're doing and how we're spending our time, but we can use a more coarse
granularity (like "half days").

~~~
MoBattah
Engineers agree with your sentiment. People managers, I'm not so sure they've
come to the same conclusion.

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puranjay
I've realized that different people work differently. I'm a "rhythm" worker. I
work best when I have minimum breaks. The longer break I have between work
days, the longer it takes me to become productive.

A three day weekend would mean I would spend Monday just ramping up into
productive mode. I wouldn't reach proper productivity until Tuesday.

So really, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Perhaps giving workers the
freedom to design their own work habits would work best

~~~
da_murvel
This. I am more of a "work really intensly for X days until I'm exhausted and
never want to see a computer again, then rest for a couple of days while I
regain my productivness" person. Also, I've found that if I get up in the
morning and do something else other than work before lunch, only to start
working in the afternoon, is where I'm at my best in terms of being
productive. It's strange that we still operate by these industrialistic
workhours, when people clearly are performing at their best at different
hours.

~~~
puranjay
I gotta try that. I wake up in the morning at 6 to get a few productive hours
in. But when I get to work, I usually just end up wasting time on social media
and HN. I don't regain productivity until after lunch.

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free652
Well one more reason not to work for a startup. At least big corps offer a
better pay.

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shacharz
I think solving hard problems requires working hard. There are processes that
happen while you sleep and dream that I don't know the explanation for, which
really help you progress on an extremely difficult problem. In my experience
those processes happen only when you're very focused on your problem, it
occupies your thought 80% of your waking hours and it's the last thing on your
mind before going to sleep.

I remember I saw a video on it from a more credible source than I, but I can't
find it.

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sejtnjir
I can see how advertising a 32-hour work weeks attracts a class of people who
view work as something that supports their other interests, whereas a 40-hour
work week attracts more traditional workers who derive a large part of
identity from their work. It might be in your personal best interest to be in
the former group. But if the mentality that work comes second defines the
company's culture, that company is not going to win.

~~~
AstralStorm
Right, and this is why all big corporations fail? /s

Work is less than relevant, what matters is that your actual customer is happy
and you're finding new leads. That you can be flexible is typically a part of
it. That you never sacrifice your customer's satisfaction for your
convenience.

Being focused may or may not be a component.

(BigCo have a problem that their actual customers are often the shareholders.)

~~~
sejtnjir
What you're describing sounds exactly like a motivated worker. The OP and my
comment is about incurring a selection mechanism for unmotivated workers.

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evilDagmar
This sounds like he'd spent time low-balling on salaries until he'd collected
a cadre of people only barely interested in their work. It doesn't take much
to make those people completely disinterested in doing more than marking time.

If you're hiring people who are engaged and genuinely interested in what
they're doing and giving them a reasonable workload(!), they're likely to just
treat that day as a day they can work from home with the option to not do work
if life suddenly has plans for them.

XKCD-style admins, for instance, are likely to just spend that day spitballing
ways to reduce downtime (which make the other 32 hours less annoying) and
hardening infrastructure without having to worry about producing results.
Planning is everything for that sort of work. My occasional work-from-home
days were frequently days when I'd get a positively lurid number of things
done just because of fewer interruptions.

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FrankyHollywood
I found it very interesting, we only hear about the successes of working less,
and self steering teams. Ryan explains why this both didn't work for his
company, and made company results drop.

This is the full interview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJcTdA55aWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJcTdA55aWA)

------
k__
You have to check what you can do.

I can't write or program longer than 2h a day.

But you have to allow you to see other things as work too.

Learning about work related topics (business, tech, design, news, etc)

Answering mails and talking to other people in general.

I think the problem is not that people want to work less, it's that they want
flexibility and not wasing away in offices, when they aren't abel to work
anymore.

~~~
MoBattah
"not wasting away in offices" \- Yep.

Every day I come into an office feels like a waste compared to a day I work
from home.

A waste of my life to be more specific.

Requiring tech workers to be physically located next to each other during the
hours of 9 AM to 5 PM, five days a week for years is archaic and a slap in the
face of what we've done as an industry.

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hspak
I looked up the company on Crunchbase and they're in the 100-250 range. I
think having a lax work policy is something that doesn't scale. Having gone
through growth at company where it grew from ~100 to ~300, work starts getting
less personal at around 150+ (personal opinion backed by zero facts). When
work becomes less personal, I think it's easier to become complacent. You do
the 9-5 -- do your job and go home. If the company policy says you can take
Fridays off, hell why not take it off? I don't think there's a way to keep up
work output with an overly lax work policy.

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threeisoneis
This article brought to you by the upvotes of 25 nervous founders afraid of
their workers demanding 4 day work weeks.

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swatcoder
Per the article: the CEO of a small company made an organizational change,
gave up a year later, and then says the change is unviable generally.
Meanwhile, in paragraph 10, one other company tried the same change and it
worked great.

TLDR; nothing. This article has essentially zero information.

~~~
tasslehoff
>This article has essentially zero information.

Welcome to Business Insider

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onetimemanytime
IMO, get 6 hours of work and you should be fine. I mean work, not staying
there for 80 hours a week

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fluxic
Wow, it's almost as if workers will have to fight for better work-life balance
themselves rather than relying on the mercy of their benevolent broscience-
inspired bosses

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BadassFractal
Was curious how that experiment was going to turn out, been following it for a
few years. Not unexpected result, although I was going to give it more of a
60/40 in my mind.

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craigmorrison
32 isn’t even that low, a five day 9-5 with an hour lunch break is 35.

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h4b4n3r0
One person’s “lack of work ethic” is another’s “having a life”. Just let it
go, everything will be fine. Consider this your secret weapon for talent
retention. Nobody actually does even 32 hours of real, actual software
engineering work in a week on a routine basis.

