My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It's not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won't know until you start.
What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.
Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress
on the whole team to maintain.
What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
I personally know several people from amazon, pretty much all of them acknowledged the crazy oncall expectations there. Combine that with the pip culture and visa issues, and your statement above about being "no more stressed than anyone else" is just ridiculous
Expecting people to work at 1AM, romanticizing them as "heroes"... that's not a normal culture. That's not a healthy lifestyle for the employee and can lead to long term health consequences. And it never applies to everyone equally, because why would you call them "heroes" in the first place
It's one thing if management expects it, it's another thing if I as an employee choose to trade 4 daytime hours for 4 nighttime hours because I know I can be more productive at that time. But building that type of management expectation into a work culture is a red flag
Yeah I'm not talking about being "on call". I don't know anything about Amazon other than it's probably full of bad culture. Nowhere I've worked has ever been like that except a handful of emergencies.
I'm talking about working at a relaxed place because everyone actually gets their stuff done 9 to 5. A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two or whenever else motivation strikes to keep it that way.
I'm saying that these little nudges from the team where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work.
> A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two
I feel like in my experience it's actually less about fun and interesting and more about do you feel like the people running the company see you as a compatriot or a cog? I worked at a pretty tiny startup in college where I regularly talked with the CEO and worked directly for one of the VPs. They were great and from start to finish it's been my most positive work experience, since I felt like one of the team. Dare I say it even felt a bit like a family (well, the CEO and VP were a husband-wife team and I was a college kid at the time).
Then I switched to a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets from them that lead to multiple layoffs. The work itself is actually more interesting than what I was doing at the real startup, but the mismanagement has pushed me into a mindset of mostly only giving them what I'm contractually obligated to, with rare exceptions for smaller projects that I feel I can have a greater direct impact on. I would hazard a guess that management in that company is actually a net negative because if it wasn't for all the bad politics there, I'd probably be just as happy to give them extra time because like you say the work is fun and interesting. And I know a couple other guys there who -were- regularly giving extra time until they got repeatedly personally burned by management.
> a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets
The real startup I worked at was probably around a dozen people when I joined. You could probably grow some beyond that and still be reasonably agile (that is, the CEO still has a good idea of the day-to-day operations and can move the company to the right market fit), but once you're at a size where irrelevant middle management is capable of existing (probably around the point that you need two layers of management), I'd posit it's not really a startup any more. Although this might fly in the face of the common definition.
I initially thought above comment was about on call because of the "things catch on fire part", I guess not
> where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work
This is true except from my experience the miserable people who leave slack for others to pick up aren't normally all that miserable, just not really motivated. At least, they're not miserable until management does something about it
I think it depends. I’ve encountered some people that definitely seen that way. But I also know that during every period of prolonged underperformance in my career (there have been a couple) I have felt awful about it despite having a strong incentive to try to convince myself it’s my fault.
I think a lot of underperformers end up in a hole where they're burnt out to such an extent that they don't have the energy to leave. It takes clarity, introspection, positivity, and extra work to find a new job; those are exactly the things that burnout saps.
Of course, most people are really good at hiding their emotional state, since that's a requirement to fit into a professional workplace. The facade of happiness stays up well after the real thing is gone.
Pre-Covid, I was a VP Eng at a startup (total eng team of ~40), I had so many "discussions" with the CEO about who was in the office at what time. The team was people from all stages of life and backgrounds. My QA lead got to the office at 6am and left at 3pm to avoid traffic. Another Eng was a single mom, and was in the office from 9:30am to 3:30pm, and then got back online for a bit after 8pm. Etc. Etc.
Time and again, I'd simply reply with metrics to demonstrate how the team was hitting product & roadmap goals while improving quality. One that really made the point was the Github commit heat map, since there were commits ranging from 6am to 1am every day, with occasional outliers.
On the plus side, I felt particularly well prepared for the WFH / hybrid era, since I was already in the habit of looking at results & outcomes (and setting expectations based on these) vs. hours of butts in chairs.
That sounds great. I wish more people in mid- to high-management would see things that way. From my experience, your single mom’s schedule would be great for me.
These varied schedules won't work in every situation. Sometimes, people need to meet (even if virtually) or they need answers to questions and situations where people's schedules aren't kind of synced becomes problematic.
This sounds more like a Visa problem though. I think the best stress reliever is when you know you are safe losing your job or walking away by yourself, you have enough money saved that you can spend more than a year doing whatever you want even if you were to lose your job and without having to worry about it influencing your life. Then the motivator to do long hours and work at odd times is passion, desire to climb and feeling of ownership rather than fear of losing your job.
I'd like to know what proportion of the working population is in such a strong financial position that they have a year's worth of (nonretirement) living expenses sitting around.
If we're off in fantasy land, the real best stress reliever is to have enough money to cover your expenses for the rest of your life, so you don't even have to consider trading your time for money in the first place.
Probably not that large proportion, but working in tech if you save 50 percentage of your income you should be able to reach that position within a year.
Yes, but I think being able to generate savings for a lifetime is a much further out goal than just 1 year which in tech is very realistic to save 50 percent.
Friendly reminder that "working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr. Most people "working in tech" aren't in Silicon Valley, and can't easily save 50% of our income per year and still have enough to pay for both food and the mortgage/rent.
> "working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr.
You're of course right
> can't easily save 50% of our income
Really? Of course people are at different stages in their life (being the sole income earner in a family with 2 kids for example, would easily mean that you cannot save 50% income in lots of locations), but assuming that we're only talking about new grads (for simplicity's sake)...
I believe that in virtually all locations, tech pays well enough that you can save 50% of your income. I know it is in London, and believe the same applies in east Europe and India for example? (But truthfully, I only know of FAANG salary data for India, not sure how salaries are in the rest of the industry)
"Crazy on-call expectations that require you to be available and potentially working at any hour of the day and night" is something very different than the topic under discussion, and I didn't interpret sublinear's comment at all to be endorsing that viewpoint.
this isn't about 'on-call' or 'expectations.' Eg, I'm currently looking at a work problem casually (it's about 11 PM) because I have some time and I'm curious, so I can slack off tomorrow at work. Win win.
I have seen this repeated so often, but let me put something clear: If your work constantly requires weird hours when it could realistically be a 9-to-5 job if they just hired enough/the right people or had their marbles together in terms of organization — then the only reason you need to do this is mis-management.
I worked in the film industry where you are sometimes for actual physical reasons (the sun being the sun) required to work weird hours. Excuse my french here, but only idiots wear bad work schedules as a badge of honor. Bonus points for when you confuse the thin bond you form with the other victims of such abuse with friendship. If you constantly need to overschedule people, you did a bad job at resource allocation. If your work load is constantly on the edge and things are always "exciting" for all the wrong reasons, you are managed by incapable fools. In a smooth operation the content of the work is exciting, the schedule and the work hours boring.
You can call yourself a "hero", but it is your life (that all of us only get one of) you're wasting. If you ask me (and you didn't) there is better a good reason each time it is wasted like that.
Don't get me wrong, I am willing to step in to do the extra mile when there is a good reason, but in my experience it is very rare that there truly is. If the content of my work is exciting I can easily go for the whole day, but it would be in the interest of my employer to stop me, so I can do this for months without burnout and fatigue.
Especially in IT, most deadlines are arbitrary moments in time, pulled out of someone's ass. If the deadline is so tight that people need to work more hours, either there has to be a very good reason which there very well might be, or someone's shit at making deadlines. Then admit you did poorly at planning, move the deadline, and only then can you start thinking about making your people work overtime.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am.
Please don’t call these people “heroes”, and if you’re doing this, please stop. You’re setting expectations that everyone else should also be up at 1am “casually looking at work”, and if they’re not, they’re not a true “hero”.
This is how unhealthy work/life balance starts at companies. People that work after hours for fun is is called workaholism. Meanwhile, the people that are also having fun from 9-5 are suddenly not doing enough, and are no longer having fun.
And of course the “heroes” are not stressed — they’re able to enjoy working long hours, and making their way up the ranks by being a “hero”.
Framing abuse and alienation as heroism is how capitalism extracts value from the most precious resource in our decadent lives: time and energy.
Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.
> Framing abuse and alienation as heroism is how capitalism extracts value from the most precious resource in our decadent lives: time and energy.
I think it’s broader than capitalism. It’s a tool of coercion. If you manage to gaslight people and make them feel bad about their performance, then it’s easier to make them do absurd things without resistance. Nothing the stakhanovites would not do and while they were living in a kind of dystopia, it had nothing to do with capitalism.
> Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.
Agreed. It's important to put enough effort that you find meaning in your work, but not so much that it ruins your wellbeing. Here's a rough algorithm that works for me:
1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task.
2. Double it and let the team know you did that.
3. Do the work well including good documentation.
4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope.
5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule.
I agree. This requires a healthy workplace though.
I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again.
It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)
Maybe. But that’s like learning to build a car and then building one and fine tuning one because I had to go to an office 200 meters away once in a few years.
Yeah, I did Texin’ in college and tried after that as well. No body gave a shit and now when I look at CVs for hiring purposes I don’t give a shit either. Now my CV is on a live.com free throwaway account — that’s where it resides and gets worked upon and converted to PDF when needed.
In my humble opinion you have started totally on something that a study/poll like this doesn’t even point to.
You are talking about I/we/people “wanting/loving/preferring” to work at certain hours or for certain length of hours (usually not often or not regularly/daily) compared to being “asked/made/forced/expected” to work that way often/regularly/daily.
> Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow.
It could be argued that code exploration at the pace you need should be part of your regular working hours, if that is what is needed to do your job efficiently. In the extreme, not allowing your employees to do so is failed management.
Of course, the knowledge and efficiency you gain by doing so is not measurable by any quantifiable metric, so it's easy to see how it will be conveniently discarded as unnecessarily.
Even better, by having you convinced that it is something you should do in your own free time, they can reap the benefits without the costs. Full profit.
> Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly.
You need more predictability than that in most things. Even start ups. The picture you are painting is of a badly organized company that needs to slow down a bit and ... think.
I have worked for that kind of company and the more boring sort. The more boring sort tends to make more profit.
Startups might be different, but it must be intentful chaos - not getting caught up in pointless busywork.
> Some days you can stop early.
Rarely. The only companies that allow that are probably the ones that made you do a 24h stint the day before.
Form the point of view of a maker / contributor it's common sense that the more tired you are, the worse your output will be. For me, there is a cut off point where the time spent working "tired" or after hours is just not worth the return anymore.
That said, not every work is directly "building" - some aspects of a job might involve collaboration, communication and helping others out when they're stuck. Spending some time after hours to help a colleague who got stuck might have a result which is disproportionately larger to the input that a tired person had.
I'd guess most people have had the experience of working late and beating their head against a problem for hours, leaving it, and solving it in minutes the next morning.
This isn't about opinion. There's increasing hard evidence that limited hours and a four day work week don't just increase employee happiness, they increase productivity and company value.
The question isn't "Why do only some people regularly want to work long hours?" but "Why are long hours considered heroic, when in fact they cause predictable harm to individuals and organisations?"
It's not just IT. Law, medicine, finance, and even big-name architecture all have the same culture of professional hazing where newcomers are expected to give themselves stress-related PTSD before they're allowed to start climbing the ladder.
And the abuse becomes generational because of "It never did me any harm" - when in fact it clearly did.
Maybe it's something like a much milder kind of historical human sacrifice, where the intuition is that greater sacrifice means greater reward. This is useful in some cases such as delayed gratification but is harmful when the sacrifice is seen as directly producing the desired gain.
Generally there's a correlation between sacrifice and and reward- the "no pain no gain" idea goes back fairly far for example. When the intuition taken to it's logical extreme that the greater the ask the greater the sacrifice necessary, which is where you get something like Moloch.
It's interesting you mention the ladder and hazing - one idea is that human sacrifice was more prevalent the stronger the hierarchy, and that sacrifice helped support the hierarchy and priests in a position of authority, which seems to run parallels to what you're describing.
I'm in the "creative" field (aka, visual time-based arts, so to speak, but honestly, it's "work," and in the same vein, every other job is teeming with much-needed creativity that often doesn't get translated to visual arts, but that's an aside). But this is how I approach my work as well. All that is to say, I really appreciate this post, and it's very validating to whatever I've experienced in the "creative" visual arts field. Which to me kinda points to larger meta patterns that emerge from work in general.
In my younger days when I worked in an office, my "in-office" time was largely just seat-warming, because it's very difficult for me to actually get much done in the office environments that companies seem to prefer. Instead, I'd actually do my work on my "off hours", when I can be in a productive environment.
As I aged, though, I started wanting to have a life outside of programming, so stopped that practice. Now my employer has to be happy with whatever I can get done during work hours, but I have a much happier life.
There is a difference between being excited about learning this fancy technology thing in your 20ies and having to deal with the same basic shit to afford desirable lifestyle in 30ies.
> Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.
Part of me thinks that it's an open secret that this is the only way anything of real quality gets done. I've been burned by investing too much into pet projects, though.
> My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it.
Why? Just work your hours.
Once I grew out of the initial imposter syndrom in my first job, I would never work late for some arbitrary deadline.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
Oh please. They are losers getting abused, not heroes. And they wage dump the rest of us.
You can get away with romantizing that for hackers or business owners in the startup phase. That is like 0,5% of us.
> It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project
While I understand the sentiment (BTDT and thoroughly enjoyed it!) it is very important to see this as a management failure. If something is vital (or even mildly important) to the success of a project, it must be accounted for in the timeline and properly resourced.
Anything else leads to deathmarch projects where the extra free work after hours becomes more and more expected and required, no longer a fun diversion.
You only see people going on-call with no stress because everyone else burned out and quit. Very simple selection effect. Declaring that things can never be better and that this is fine prevents us from finding useful and meaningful improvements that will make our teams happier, healthier, more productive, more stable, and more inclusive.
Well, as long as you don't expect others to perform in similar way all is fine.
Since, you know, we have this tiny little thing called actual life we enjoy living, which definitely absolutely 100% doesn't happen in front of screen, any screen. Or you/we have kids. Or need 7-8h of sleep like a normal person does.
Doesn't matter at the end what are the reasons, I know on my proverbial death bed (and all years from right now leading to it) I would regret massively spending more time at work then necessary, since it eats time I can do everything else. Life is awesome if you do some effort to make it so. Not so much without that effort part, then even that screen may look like a good use of time. Also life is much much shorter than youngish folks feel like it is, and the window for great experiences is much smaller.
What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.
Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.
What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.