For some companies, for some types of work, for some contexts, fine. But I'm getting really tired of people assuming that their limited experience in their limited world applies universally.
More importantly - be intelligent about your policies. Consider what the work is, and how people work best. Give them the power and the responsibility to get things done. Allow them to take control, and make sure they are well informed about what you're trying to accomplish, and what the various external forces might be.
But don't tell me not to set hours for my employees. I've consulted with them, we've worked together, and for our context, with our customers, with our work, and in our marketplace, we, together, have concluded that regular hours in the office are the best way to work as a team and get the job done.
Your context will be different - be intelligent about your choices.
I would be highly suprised if you had consulted all your staff on such issues, generally such a thing may be discussed early on when policy is set, but it's unlikely to be reviewed after some staff churn but I'll take your word on it.
Regardless, he's aruging for something that's going against the grain, so he doesn't need to actually give a balanced approach. We already know the advantages and hopefully the disadvantages or working set hours, so we don't need to hear it, we just need a strong argument for his point of view. You don't generally route for the other side in a debate, so the complaints are misplaced.
Also it's not surprising as an employer you feel set hours are the right approach for you. I'm not making a judgment on you, but it's very common for employers to make leaving at 5 O'clock very awkward and they never seem to have a problem asking employees to do work out of hours, while generally being very quiet about policy to get that time back.
Over the short term, abusing your employees in such a way comes with no disadvantages, so the employers love it. Long term, the same employees will probably become disheartened, but we live in a society where we'd rather replace those employees and charge on ahead. If you do any of these things, you're the type of employer the article is arguing against, if not, then your morale is probably fine which is the real undertone of such articles.
We did consult all our staff, with only 25 it wasn't hard. There were differences of opinion, but a balance was found. Further, we have no churn - as I write this, no one has left in the last 11 years.
We are explicit about out-of-hours work, because sometimes we have engineers in the field working in very different time zones. In those cases the staff decide among themselves who will be providing support, and the company policies about recompense are clear. The compensation policies were agreed by all affected staff, and they seem genuinely content.
We take this seriously, not least because it would be possible to abuse our position.
Well I'm not super suprised if you actually treat your employees right that you don't have a lot of staff churn.
Removing abusing your employees, pay them resonably well, and give them something to do, and you've probably removed 90% of the reasons people move company, especially considering most employees know it probably won't be the case if they move elsewhere.
Truly well done if that's the case, it's a shame that such a thing seems to be the exception from my experience. :)
> such a thing seems to be the exception from my experience
Here's an interesting thing: from my experience (and I've worked for many companies over 25+ years) this is not a rare exception.
However, such a culture absolutely requires mature, responsible, reliable and honest employees. Maintaining such a culture requires everyone's active effort, not just that of the boss. Companies select for that, those qualities often carries more weight than skill or experience.
Time and time I've seen people bitching about their work environment in a way which immediately sets of alarms about that person. I wouldn't hire them, and I'm guessing neither would ColinWright.
Don't take this personally, I don't know you or your experience, but I think many people who complain about good employers being rare should take a look in the mirror.
I'm not taking it personally, it was a good comment, but i think you could be off slightly. It really depends how you're finding jobs, where you're working and how many companies you've worked for, your personality, etc.
You're from a different generation from me and you have much more experience, so hopefully you're right. On the other hand, I think it's possible that things have changed and the people out there who'll attempt to exploit youth could be more common.
Personally I've been offered jobs by people I know who'll treat me right, that's an option I didn't have when I was 20, but it's a different story now I'm _almost_ 30. It's probably a bit of both either way though. :)
That's a really low effort reply that adds nothing to the topic. Plus the OP's age is irrelevant. Even if he was 70 his point would be no more or less valid, and would still likely have the same issues.
Maybe it wasn't so eloquently stated, but it's a valid point.
The article is written by someone who is not yet 30 and started his company, a small web design company, 14 years ago. He has likely worked with young, small teams and has no other experience.
The article itself comes off as naive and doesn't even say who the advice is intended for. It's reminiscent of a bad assignment for an undergraduate management course.
I read that as the original article OP, not the person posting on HN; whose point are you defending here?
OT: wouldn't it be great if software like HN made it trivially easy to indicate WHO was being talked about? OP is apparently confusing - perhaps colour coding, or some other visual cue rather than "the post two posts above the reply to the previous post" or the mangled cut'n'paste of someone's barely readable grey handle that we have now.
I thought it was pretty clear that "OP" in this case referred to "Original Poster", by which s/he means the person who wrote the article. It can't really refer to groundCode, because there's no way to work out his/her age. "OP" stands for "Original Poster."
Your point is valid, but it's usually easily deduced, or the person who wrote the ambiguous comment should simply have been clearer.
He's also talking about the article OP, and he's saying that the HN poster's reply about age is very low-effort and doesn't contribute much, apart from an ad hominem.
I love how many people don't actually know this. Most of those same people also hate unions because they don't realize how many of their "rights" were earned and secured by them.
In just the same way plenty of people now don't know about what the unions then went on to create or enable. Spanish practices, crippling national strikes, the near inability to fire poorly performing staff, closed shops and intimidation of non union labour.
Many of these rights were also secured because the awful production line jobs were sent overseas (cf Bangladesh). Unions were a powerful force for good - but they also created huge problems in some countries once those rights had been one and they failed to modernise. Modern trade unions are again a powerful force for good, but those are the ones that aren't going on strike all the time and hardly anyone has a problem with them.
Unions were created to counterbalance corporate power. To say we should get rid of unions because they're not perfect is just idiotic. Ever since unions have been all but crushed in the US, labor protection laws have disappeared, strikes have become mostly illegal, staff can be fired at will and union members are intimidated. Maybe the answer is to get rid of corporations?
Don't forget government power. One person alone can not effectively negotiate with a local, county or state government, let alone the federal government. On top of that, government salaries are often so significantly less than corporate salaries that government employees can't afford attorneys who know corporate and labor law.
> Maybe the answer is to get rid of corporations?
Hyperbole aside, there is no silver bullet to the situation as it stands. And I'm not informed enough to make any claims as to what could fix it. I just find it horribly hilarious when unions are made out to be so evil and corporations are made out to be the good in any fight. Unions at least have the interest (to a degree) of their members to protect, corporations just care about profit.
They're the only ones fighting to defend those rights. They're also the only reason highly political positions, like state and municipality workers, can not be fired when the new political powers take over and want to provide patronage.
But I guess if you willfully deal with the government as an employer, that's your own fault, right?
Then specify that because otherwise you're attacking all unions. There are no perfect unions. There never have been but they still play an important part in the labor force.
The author, Ilya Pozin, has worked in exactly 1 company that he founded for 13 years. This is not a ad hominem attack, I just don't think it's possible to make such sweeping generalizations with such a narrow range of experience.
There's two reasons hours are useful, internal and external teamwork. Nobody works alone, if you have somebody in 7-3 and somebody 11-7, there's a significant period without overlap. This can be even more problematic if your team doesn't have regular hours at all so that you can't even plan for this.
For external parties, your clients, customers, etc., you want to be responsive to their needs. Most companies work 9-5, though timeszones can make this tricky.
Plenty of people say that the most productive time is when there's no one else in the office. Four hours of overlap should be enough for a range of jobs (at least software development). At the very least, it will force those people who need to work together to plan. I agree that there should be a routine and there probably is. I would think in general young urban folks would prefer to come to work at 11am or noon while family and older folks would prefer 8 or 9am.
I've heard the argument about people only being productive when nobody else is around before, sometimes it's even been me saying it. With the benefit of hindsight I know that it's just another symptom of bad management.
It tends to be caused by people being responsible for both support and new development, and the latter gets squeezed out by the needs of the former; or domain knowledge being concentrated in a few employees, who feel they are swamped helping others instead of doing the work they should be doing.
Being too busy is a problem in itself, people who are busy are less efficient in the long run because they are focused on short-term goals. It's why you see people fighting with terrible build systems, they don't have the time to fix them even though they are wasting time every day due to them.
There's no right or wrong answer with things like hours, we operate in the big grey area in the middle. It's about finding the best compromise where the happiness of the group is maximized without negatively impacting the business.
>Plenty of people say that the most productive time is when there's no one else in the office.
Yes, but that is not inherent to having other people in the office, it is a symptom of a bad office. Intellect workers require a quiet space where they can work without distraction and interruption. In most offices, the only way to get that is to be there when nobody else is there. In an office where management isn't clueless, people could get that all the time.
Yet another article asking for the abolition of the 40 hour week. It's very telling that the article stresses disadvantages of the 9-to-5 model for the enterprise or for getting the work done, but it doesn't list the effect, disadvantageous or not, on employees.
And then he slips this: After all, during a big project it’s important your employees don’t feel inclined to exit as soon as the clock strikes 5 p.m. Very telling; and also note that time crunching is most often caused by bad planification than by lack of productivity.
As for the points explained, I strongly disagree with the first, the second and especially the fourth (not only it doesn't promote teamwork, since not every one is in the office at a given time: also, it can quickly devolve into a race to the bottom where everyone tries to do the highest amount of hours, which is the real productivity killer via burnout). I find the third point dubious, although it's worth discussing.
Not to be terse, but a pretty dumb sentiment, one that generally only applies well to small teams on small projects in office environments.
The larger the team, the greater the need for interaction between the members. And that doesn't mean an email response 2 hours after the initial one was sent because you just woke up.
In some very real ways, 9-5 is archaic. But it serves a purpose today - it puts everyone in the office at the same time during hours where there's someone to take care of children.
It's more about consistency and reliability than history.
It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria. The real reason behind being in the office, 9 times out of 10 (made up internet stats), is because your manager doesn't know how to gauge productivity and thus uses the bum's on seat approach.
In my experience, having a technical manager means you're much more likely to get flexiable hours or remote working, where the manager knows they can check on your productivity by looking at commit history and project managment tools. Same deal might happen with non-technical managers after you have built a relationship of trust.
Exceptions exist of course, but most everyone else doesn't have a clue what they're doing, so they make sure you show up, tell you what to do, squeeze you on impossible deadlines, and basically make your life miserable. It's just the status quo where you have middle management trained to be managers without any real knowledge in their field they are managing.
That's not to say there aren't any advantages to the 9-5, just my personal opinion based on anecdotal experiences. :p
Every so often there's a HN discussion about task effort estimation - usually that no-one is very good at it. Take your best estimate, one joke goes, then increment the units so days become weeks and weeks become months. It'll always take twice as long as you expect, goes another, even after you've doubled your estimate to take this into account.
Can one gauge productivity by tasks completed without a good estimate of the effort required for a given task?
> It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria
How often does this happen where you're not working with a single other person? Another developer, QA, designers, product managers...
I can see if you're working on your own startup, but if you're on a team of people it's very unhelpful to have any one person just go off on their own for days a time.
I don't know, I've been working from home primarily for the last 3 years. We use IRC, XMPP, e-mail, version control systems, project managment software, etc.
With all this tech, it's pretty simple for me to do something and leave it for someone else to pickup while I sleep, as long as we both go to the effort to do our parts properly in the first place.
Even in an office, working on a startup, I would often find myself working on my code, while other people are working on theirs with the expectation I'll do mine correct.
It just seems to work from my experience, though I'd still much rather prefer to live close to work to pop in and attend meetings without it being a plane flight away.
Precisely. If you're the only one on the project, it may make sense that you make your own hours. That of course assumes that your deadline permits scheduling offsets with project/product managers, etc.
Otherwise you're talking about wasted time due to the staggering of schedules.
But those situations are pretty rare in most companies.
5. I pay these people, so they shouldn't get to have lives outside the salary i've bestowed upon them.
My employees don't understand that if i wasn't for their lazy asses we'd be the next instagram, or reddit or whatever. the only thing standing between me and striking a huge payday is my employees desire to not constantly be working.
After having been abused by employers who didn't understand why an employee wouldn't want to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for months on end (I'm not exagerating here) I have a slight skepticism of people looking to abolish a finite work week.
I look forwards to the day that shops open whenever someone happens to be around to unlock the door and there's someone in who can work the till. That'll work out great for everyone.
"Thank you for calling BigCo. Unfortunately our call-centre staff are all afternoon people and won't be in until 1pm. Please call back then."
"Sorry bud, the loading dock staff get in at 5 to finish early. Can you come to pick up the packages tomorrow, a bit earlier this time?"
"An ISP technician will come around to your house to fix the problem between 1am and 4am. He's a bit of a night owl"
Of course, all the people in the comments that are for the abolition of set hours would likely change their tune if the employees decide to shorten their weeks. "That project can't be done by then".
"during a big project it’s important your employees don’t feel inclined to exit as soon as the clock strikes 5 p.m." That statement belies so many things about Mr. Pozin's outlook on employees.
1. The reason employees bolt for the door is because they have things to do. Believe it or not employees have lives outside of work. I can't think of any project that would be "big" enough to miss a daughter's soccer game or son's concert. And if that means I need to leave the office at a certain time to do so, then so be it.
2. By offering flexible hours, employers seem to be able to demand employees work long upon demand. No thank you.
3. Working long hours to crunch for a big project is shown time and time again to not be effective. Why not fight the cause instead of accommodating it with flex time?
All that said, I'm convinced the best, long-term answer is to not be an employee. Instead, freelancing will continue to become more and more common.
>big project is shown time and time again to not be effective
The first week, 60 hours works. The second, it's still more productive than 40 hours, but not as much, after that, it isn't, then actively dips below a constant stream of 40 hour weeks.
So depending on how short your spikes are, it can be fine.
For purely "creative" positions, we don't care how, where and when the employee works. Especially when working on challenging features I understand that some people like to somehow "retreat" to think (I work like this).
You like to work in the middle of busy café? No problem.
You like to work from home? No problem.
You like to work from 9 to 5? No problem.
You like a variation of the above depending on your mood? No problem.
The only thing we ask is to keep the communication open, ie, don't fall into an autistic "I never show up" way of work.
Which leads me to the following.
When there are meetings, when we're at a customer or when there is any kind of external constraint we have absolutely no tolerance for lateness or approximation.
Yeah, while I'll happily argue against keeping hours or working from home where appropriate, one of the bigger issues is that some of people arguing for this are lazy or disorganized.
On the plus side, these people are going to be the same whether they're in your office or not, thus I've never actually believed keeping them in the office will serve any real benefit, you need employees you can trust, either way.
I have to say, I'm more interested in the job titles of the majority of the commenters on this article. So LinkedIn is only full of managers, consultants and recruiters.
If the point is that fixed in stone "arrive at work a 9, leave at 5" hours don't make sense, sure. Even some of the most regressive government bureaucracies recognized that in the 80's and have some degree of flexibility.
If the point is that modern work is so special and creative that it is more of an artistic creation, and thus requires "passion" (translated as work 60 hours a week), than no, that is a ridiculous assertion and a work practice that should be illegal.
It's a very short article, with a list of benefits. Any potential problems are very briefly mentioned.
But these problems could be significant, and a discussion of them could have made the article much more useful and interesting.
For example: people do compare their performance against that of their colleagues. People do steal credit for work done by other people. How do managers deal with this? There's the potential for significant ill-will if Ann is picking up Bob's slack, but not getting the recognition for it. And if Bob is getting recognition for the work that Ann is doing it's worse. And if Ann's work is suffering, and she's told people and been ignored, and she's losing out, then it's even worse.
Management advice often feels superficial. It'd be great if people writing this advice started making more use of good quality research. I guess it'd be good if more good quality research was available too.
The main problem is that most employers with expectations around work hours enforce the start time but don't adequately support a reasonable end time.
This is our fault, as we've basically let this happen. I've personally told developers on my teams to go home on time and I get excuses like "well I'll just end up watching TV or wasting time."
To this my response has always been "save that energy for when the project really needs it, because it will. When things are calmer, go have a life."
Unfortunately, I think most business leaders are ignorant about the urgency of work, or they take the attitude of "push until they push back". This leads to the burnout, apathy, and overall lack of commitment over time from their employees.
We've pretty much removed all incentive to work long hours, or even just 8 hours, because or "collective" starting time is around 10-ish, but all of management is usually gone before half past five, and I actively encourage people to go home. On rare occasions does someone who's really in the zone stay past six.
The problem I don't have any grip on is people working from home. Because we're pretty flexible and developers enjoy their work, I often see them working in the evenings or in the weekend, when there is really no need for it. Also, people who work from home all day invariable tend to make longer hours.
This worries me a bit, but I'm not sure how to address that.
That's awesome, you seem to have a much better grip on this than 99% of your peers in leadership positions at technology companies. You should put your contact info your profile as I'm sure lots of people would love to work for you!
As for the late night work at home, I would recommend you do one-on-ones (or have their managers do one-on-ones) with the late night workers to make sure they aren't being overwhelmed without saying anything. Showing that you're proactive about it helps build that trust.
Another thing I've noticed is that when you have a strong in-office culture (which it sounds like you have), sometimes it's difficult to stay on top of individual tasks while you're in the office. There are always side conversations, ad-hoc discussions, or even a higher frequency of in-person meetings during the day. These things are important to maintain culture, but often eat into a person's time so much that they have to get caught up at night. Sometimes the late night work is simply catching up on emails from the day or it's finishing up a minor coding task.
But in worst case scenarios, people can't get anything done in the office so they resort to early morning work (before anyone shows up) or they always work late regularly. Keeping a pulse on that and handling it before it becomes a cultural problem is very important.
Plus, if you don't have set hours, and focus only on goals -- then you can expect your employees to work 50, 80, 100 hours a week in order to accomplish their goals (which were probably set by you not them), whatever it takes.
When it comes to IT, I can buy it. However, ask yourself how you would run a manufacturing plant when you didn't know when people would be there? Or, how would customer service work if there was no one to answer the phones?
However, is such a policy implementable at a large corporation like Google or Microsoft? It is certainly within reach of startups that have a dozen or even a couple of hundred employees.
More importantly - be intelligent about your policies. Consider what the work is, and how people work best. Give them the power and the responsibility to get things done. Allow them to take control, and make sure they are well informed about what you're trying to accomplish, and what the various external forces might be.
But don't tell me not to set hours for my employees. I've consulted with them, we've worked together, and for our context, with our customers, with our work, and in our marketplace, we, together, have concluded that regular hours in the office are the best way to work as a team and get the job done.
Your context will be different - be intelligent about your choices.