Something that the software industry has to assimilate eventually is that unless your organization is very efficient, there's not a big difference between working for 6 or 10 hours a day.
Scrum / agile / whatever as understood by most companies does not prevent context switching, synchronous work that could be done asynchronously, and interruptions. When added together, those things shrink your team's capacity massively. I'm talking real capacity, not some magical number made up at some meeting.
Work could be relatively linear. The people who can make it happen just don't care or are clueless about it.
It's extremely taxing to do more than about 6 hours of real, actual work a day, so any extra hours are almost necessarily spent in less taxing activities like meetings etc.
Meetings are the most taxing part of the job to me. I can program for 10 hours when I’m in a flow state. I can sit in a meeting for maybe 10 minutes before I start doodling.
ADHD people are more sensitive to boredom than normies; they are boredom canaries if you will. Normies can deny themselves the excitement/novelty marshmallow in exchange for other rewards later; ADHD people have much greater difficulty with this.
Honestly I’ve been longing for a linear workday. Before kids, and before the pandemic, I used to work 9-6 and I had the most fantastic work life balance. Distance running, rock climbing, etc.
Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all cramming in whatever I can late at night so that I can accommodate the schedule of kids’ daycare. If we didn’t have flex hours, one of my wife or I would have no choice but to quit to manage the kids, and we’d have less income but probably be happier. But since we have the choice it’s all too tempting to keep burning the candle at both ends and the middle.
>In decades past, non-linear workdays used to be fairly uncommon.
They still are fairly uncommon. Source: traffic jams.
But for real. There is a trend to be a little more flexible, yet most places in the world continue to require the most obvious candidates for both remote and asynchronous work to function 'hybrid' and synchronously. It's incredibly telling Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days everything ends up jammed here.
If that wasn't enough, the 'we are doing Scrum' movement heavily pushes synchronous stand-ups and other meetings in the morning. Since most places also require video (yuck), good luck trying to just sit at a meeting and then go back to bed. If your ideal is to work the latter half of the day, we're still a far cry from normalizing it. I'd wager you can replace 'Scrum' with something else equally applicable in other disciplines.
Worst part is, we're still forcing the workerbees to fit the 9-5 rhythm, but the services are also working on a 9-5 rhythm. So how does Worker Bee use a service only available when they should be working? Not their problem, that's your problem (no seriously, who designed this structure?)
There are other ways to work. My team has a mid day standup a few days a week and it’s ok to miss sometimes. You’re expected to communicate primarily in writing and people keep different hours, it’s quite nice. We’re all adults here.
Agreed. My gf was recently asked to attend 5am meetings on her thursdays and Fridays. Her stance is a little different than mine, I would’ve outright refused but she accepted. Her boss said she could go back to sleep right after the meetings but we all know that’s not as easy as it sounds
I work exactly as this article describes, but 25 hours per week.
It feels like I am doing the productive 25 hours of a 37 hour work week. I log my hours pretty accurately, which I think makes it a better deal for my employer - no commuting, nothing social, and I'm picking the most productive hours for me. I've also got some freedom to switch between tasks (writing, coding, it's largely only teaching needs me to stick to appointments).
It absolutely feels like work fitting around my life (kids, gym, family visits) rather than the other way round.
I work some (even most) evenings, but only because I like to take bits of the day "off".
I agree this would be a horrible encroaching way to work for an employer who expects tHE exTRa MiLe, but those guys are horrible to work for already.
Not necessarily. Ive worked with American companies from the UK for most of my career. A flexible work environment means I can go golfing at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning when it's sunny and my partner is in the office, or I can work a Saturday morning when I want a Monday morning as a swap because I have a concert on the next city over and I won't make the last train home (both of these are examples of what I've done in the last 6 months).
I struggle immensely with that. Knowing that I will "have to" work tonight is a source of stress and I'm incapable of loosening until I am done for the day. Iwl want to go to work, do my duty, and be done with it. I don't see this as an improvement, but as a work around instead of effectively moving towards less work.
To be completely honest, with cognitive labor, i.e. what programmers and other "knowledge workers" do, the relationship between time spent working and productive output is completely erased. In contrast with the factory and plant work, where it's pretty easy to say that in N hours a worker can produce Y units, knowledge work can't be reduced to value/time spent.
Anyone who has been programming for very long and been asked to give and adhere to time-based estimates knows this problem. The best we can do is look at a task and say how big or complicated it looks, but putting an hour or day number on it is impossible.
Something can be *lazy synchronous* for instance you can write some code now, stop for an hour and start again, but you still need to be sync-ed with others in a few-days time frame in general. You can pack customers orders at an irregular peace but they want them delivered so you should anyway produce something fast enough. Something MUST be synchronous, a doctor can't cure a patient asynchronously. A dentist can't fill a tooth cavity asynchronously with the patient.
That's can be called flexible scheduling, the opposite of the most current industrial just-in-time model. Drop the just-in-time model means more smartness, knowledge, decision power is needed at every level of the process, like Toyota win against Ford, like we have done in the past and we have tried to stop in the relatively recent time to centralize power.
The centralization theory was designed basically because some see automation as a way to satisfy their thirst for power, cutting intermediate hierarchies and rule as ancient absolute monarch, formally with the justification that dictatorship make decisions faster then Democracies. Such theory prove again to be a scam, we can't sustain for long. Complex hierarchies of course have their issues, but thanks to automation and TLCs we can overcome many of them. Only we need *distributed* knowledge, culture, power, like the ITs of early pioneering days have foresee for a bright future. Unfortunately modern management/politicians/finance cohorts hate such model as they hate Democracy.
The real fallacy is that yes, dictatorships are faster IF they came from a non-dictatorship background. Nazi scientist realize a big advance in knowledge BUT they was not born/educated under the nazi regime. That's the point. It's about time to switch from the "infinite growth model" to the "infinite evolution model".
Didn't actually die for the 40-hour work week, but he did institute one at Ford, possibly because he thought it would increase productivity vs. a 48-hour week and drive demand for cars since workers would drive places on the weekends.
The 8 hour day [0] did not happen because employers were nice, it was a hard, often bloody, fight in countries all over the world. Spain put it into law in the 16th century, most of the world didn’t get it until the early 20th century.
Increases in productivity probably help, but you could say the same thing about the last 30 years — a time when globally wage growth has been flat for most.
Time again, history shows labor rights are demanded not given, except for the few industries where people are most valuable asset of a company.
You can easily work 13 hours a week if you are willing to enjoy early 20th century living standards! The gains from productivity are distributed between extra leisure time and extra material benefits.
In the middle of nowhere with no car or household appliances or health care where half of your food comes out of your garden, of course you can afford that.
You could also afford to live in a fire trap tenement house with your family of 8 in two bedrooms, although said houses are now illegal so you probably can't physically do that anymore.
When has providing for a family of eight been the norm in america? I assume you're thinking something like two kids plus all four grandparents living under one roof? That's never been the norm.
Most of the 1600s and 1700s for New England. Quebec for longer, possibly the end of unit 1800s. That’s average number of children per woman, not an extended family. 1800s Ireland, which was probably poorer than the US has been since 1600 had similar fertility.
I still wouldn't say that is the norm, since the infant mortality rate was ~40%. And, if you're producing a baby every 2 years, by the time you're on your 8th baby, your first-borns, should they have lived, would be nearly able-bodied adults with the ability to also work a bit to help support the household or going out and getting married.
Nah, depends on the ability to coordinate. Communist governments can suppress wages even with enormous productivity gains, like post 1949 Shanghai. Capitalists mostly can’t though. Even with non state puppet unions completely illegal as in the PRC or Vietnam competition for workers leads to rises in wages. Maintaining a cartel without being able to enforce contracts to that effect is hard with fewer than 10 conspirators. Once you have more than 100 people bidding for workers’ labour it’s impossible.
Unions aren’t necessary for increasing wages. We can tell from countries that they’re illegal.
Unions are necessary, as we see when we look at the US. As productivity has increased workers are receiving a smaller and smaller piece of the resulting wealth. Not coincidentally labor is less organized now than it has been in almost a century. If you have power you get resources, simple as that. Individual workers usually have almost no power - they may get a little bit of power temporarily when their skill is heavily in demand but that isn't enough to counteract the inherent power imbalance capital possesses.
I think you've misinterpreted GP. Tech salaries started high, and that is mostly a scarcity problem. The market will correct that in due time without labor organizing because the profits go to the owners, not the workers. The owners are the ones who decide what happens with the profit (reinvestment, their employees' wages, their own wages, etc.).
Yes, with a powerful union you can restrict entry so there are fewer workers. The workers who are allowed in get a better deal. The people who are kept out by the union suffer and the consumers suffer through lower production and higher prices.
It's not necessary to restrict the number of workers - only to refuse to work if the owners allocate too little of the resulting profits back to the workers. This is in fact the whole point of a union.
No need for that. The golden c64 generation will start with early retirements in a few years. Younger generations have less interest in IT (on average) and will yield fewer and fewer tech workers.
What I describe is the mechanism by which unions increase wages for their members. It would be good if you could explain what you were trying to say and its relevance.
Yes. You get less workers by restricting entry. That reduces output but increases union workers bargaining power, making society generally poorer but the members of the union richer.
This greatly depends on which part of the 'tech' industry you're in. Yes, if you're at the top, salaries are enormous, but uh, vast majority of people in 'tech' are not receiving enormous salaries.
in tech, we don't really have 40hr/wk. It's more like 80hr/wk. And work on weekends. If you have a position that requires 40hrs/wk or less and no work on weekends whatsoever, consider yourself lucky. I hear stories about colleagues being overworked on continuous basis.
Speak for yourself. The vast majority of engineers I know (in the US and Europe) don't do more than 40 hours a week and without weekends, and oftentimes many work even fewer hours, perhaps even 20 hours a week. There are also so many jobs that if you're truly doing more than 40, that's because you want to or at least haven't bothered to start looking to switch jobs.
> If you have a position that requires 40hrs/wk or less and no work on weekends whatsoever, consider yourself lucky.
That's backwards. If you have a position that requires over 40hrs/wk, or any weekend work without overtime pay, consider yourself exploited (and if you're doing it without it being required, consider yourself a scab). Join a union, quit that job, or both.
Somehow, I've managed to work 40/hr week or less at all of my jobs.
Recently, due to a disability, I've been limited to a max of 40 hr/wk with a restricted schedule (M-F 0800-1800). Unfortunately, I can't do on-call and no matter how severe an incident is in the middle of the night, I'm not available.
No one has an issue with this. In a funny way, it's good I'm on the team because we're always testing the "Kayodé bus factor". Thus far, it's been more than 1.
That is most definitely not the case in Australia. I'm a dev, I never work weekends. I do sometimes work later in the day meaning some weeks are probably a bit more than 40 hours, but I also take long lunch breaks or leave early so some weeks are also probably slightly less. This is the case for all the devs I know as well, and more than a small amount of regular OT is seen as cause to quit and get work elsewhere.
There is an exception for dev managers, who seem to work longer hours generally but definitely nothing approaching 80 hours
In countries where labor laws are strong working more than 40 hours a week in a salaried role is not common. And when there is overtime, it’s often taken in lieu and expected that you get those hours back out of your regular day.
If you have a position that requires more than 40 hours a week regularly, do the math on your hourly rate, and look at hour its affecting your health. If you’re under 25 you’ll probably get away with it, if not the second order impacts on your life are not insignificant, and can make you less productive.
I don’t know anyone who does much over 40 hours in the UK, let alone anything close to 80 hours. A few might pick up urgent tasks on the weekend, but only when needed and not regularly.
I think also depends where in the US. In Seattle, a lot of tech workers are with Amazon. When I worked with Amazon, over two years, there were perhaps two weeks total where I worked less than 50 hours. In that job, and in several that followed, the office was for collaboration, meetings, maybe an hour of actual work, and then at home was where the second workday began in a quiet setting & you put in 3-5 hours additional coding (plus whatever on-call threw at you).
I've worked for US companies on their EU offices for nearly 10 years, and there's definitely much less of it here, but I've definitely ran into some US employees who have been less than impressed at how unavailable I am outside hours in that time
I read that Tim Cook has a weekly Sunday evening meeting with his staff; this seems reasonable, since that time might otherwise be wasted on family, friends, or home responsibilities - rather than taking care of critically important Apple business that can't wait until Monday morning.
Sunday evening in California is Monday morning in Asia - if you wait until Monday morning in CA to start things off you burn a whole day.
Now, I doubt Tim is happy with people leaving early on Friday afternoon either - but given Apple’s business and the importance of the Asian supply chain, a Sunday evening meeting is justified.
Also anyone reporting directly to Tim Cook is being paid tens of millions per year for their trouble…
You should really try to find a new job. Crazy hours outside of some startups and super high paying jobs in a few sectors are not the norm in tech. Most people I know in the industry in NYC work 35-40 and do just fine.
Something that the software industry has to assimilate eventually is that unless your organization is very efficient, there's not a big difference between working for 6 or 10 hours a day.
Scrum / agile / whatever as understood by most companies does not prevent context switching, synchronous work that could be done asynchronously, and interruptions. When added together, those things shrink your team's capacity massively. I'm talking real capacity, not some magical number made up at some meeting.
Work could be relatively linear. The people who can make it happen just don't care or are clueless about it.
It's extremely taxing to do more than about 6 hours of real, actual work a day, so any extra hours are almost necessarily spent in less taxing activities like meetings etc.
Meetings are the most taxing part of the job to me. I can program for 10 hours when I’m in a flow state. I can sit in a meeting for maybe 10 minutes before I start doodling.
Sounds like symptoms of adult ADHD from what I've read on HN about it.
Also sounds like symptoms of boredom :P
ADHD people are more sensitive to boredom than normies; they are boredom canaries if you will. Normies can deny themselves the excitement/novelty marshmallow in exchange for other rewards later; ADHD people have much greater difficulty with this.
Even 6 hours is pushing it. I looked around and found that 4 hours is widely regarded as typical for real 'deep' work.
Honestly I’ve been longing for a linear workday. Before kids, and before the pandemic, I used to work 9-6 and I had the most fantastic work life balance. Distance running, rock climbing, etc.
Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all cramming in whatever I can late at night so that I can accommodate the schedule of kids’ daycare. If we didn’t have flex hours, one of my wife or I would have no choice but to quit to manage the kids, and we’d have less income but probably be happier. But since we have the choice it’s all too tempting to keep burning the candle at both ends and the middle.
Haven't met anybody who likes split shifts
I like them when I don't have to leave home
The other option is daycare. Which is a good reasoning for establishing universal access to daycare
>In decades past, non-linear workdays used to be fairly uncommon.
They still are fairly uncommon. Source: traffic jams.
But for real. There is a trend to be a little more flexible, yet most places in the world continue to require the most obvious candidates for both remote and asynchronous work to function 'hybrid' and synchronously. It's incredibly telling Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days everything ends up jammed here.
If that wasn't enough, the 'we are doing Scrum' movement heavily pushes synchronous stand-ups and other meetings in the morning. Since most places also require video (yuck), good luck trying to just sit at a meeting and then go back to bed. If your ideal is to work the latter half of the day, we're still a far cry from normalizing it. I'd wager you can replace 'Scrum' with something else equally applicable in other disciplines.
Worst part is, we're still forcing the workerbees to fit the 9-5 rhythm, but the services are also working on a 9-5 rhythm. So how does Worker Bee use a service only available when they should be working? Not their problem, that's your problem (no seriously, who designed this structure?)
There are other ways to work. My team has a mid day standup a few days a week and it’s ok to miss sometimes. You’re expected to communicate primarily in writing and people keep different hours, it’s quite nice. We’re all adults here.
A great way to get burned out as work encroaches on every aspect of your life. No thank you.
Agreed. My gf was recently asked to attend 5am meetings on her thursdays and Fridays. Her stance is a little different than mine, I would’ve outright refused but she accepted. Her boss said she could go back to sleep right after the meetings but we all know that’s not as easy as it sounds
I work exactly as this article describes, but 25 hours per week.
It feels like I am doing the productive 25 hours of a 37 hour work week. I log my hours pretty accurately, which I think makes it a better deal for my employer - no commuting, nothing social, and I'm picking the most productive hours for me. I've also got some freedom to switch between tasks (writing, coding, it's largely only teaching needs me to stick to appointments).
It absolutely feels like work fitting around my life (kids, gym, family visits) rather than the other way round.
I work some (even most) evenings, but only because I like to take bits of the day "off".
I agree this would be a horrible encroaching way to work for an employer who expects tHE exTRa MiLe, but those guys are horrible to work for already.
My team (4 devs) does this (<25h a week / fully flexible/async).
Some people need structure. It's a terrible arrangement for them.
Some people need training & mentorship. It's a terrible arrangement for them, too.
For experienced staff who are comfortable working with minimal support & direction, it's been the Best Thing Ever.
Not everything suits everyone, and that's okay.
It depends on what you are doing throughout the day.
I think you are right that people may likely spend more time working in the end.
We are all different, though.
My ideal situation is to do deep work for 4 hours everyday and focus on the marathon not the dash.
agreed - for me I prefer to do customer support, meetings and bug fixing in the morning, then deep focus work after 10pm.
Not necessarily. Ive worked with American companies from the UK for most of my career. A flexible work environment means I can go golfing at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning when it's sunny and my partner is in the office, or I can work a Saturday morning when I want a Monday morning as a swap because I have a concert on the next city over and I won't make the last train home (both of these are examples of what I've done in the last 6 months).
I struggle immensely with that. Knowing that I will "have to" work tonight is a source of stress and I'm incapable of loosening until I am done for the day. Iwl want to go to work, do my duty, and be done with it. I don't see this as an improvement, but as a work around instead of effectively moving towards less work.
To be completely honest, with cognitive labor, i.e. what programmers and other "knowledge workers" do, the relationship between time spent working and productive output is completely erased. In contrast with the factory and plant work, where it's pretty easy to say that in N hours a worker can produce Y units, knowledge work can't be reduced to value/time spent.
Anyone who has been programming for very long and been asked to give and adhere to time-based estimates knows this problem. The best we can do is look at a task and say how big or complicated it looks, but putting an hour or day number on it is impossible.
non-contiguous?
On nights where I don't have any plans, I'll often break from 3pm-8pm & then come back to do another hour or three.
Yeah the title bugged me as well. Non-contiguous is definitely the right word here. The word nonlinear is massively overused these days.
I suppose that'd be anything except five 8-hour blocks of time, one each day of five in a row, always at the same times of day.
I know I’m being puerile, but who figured out how to proceed through time nonlinearly? How did you do it?
Something can be *lazy synchronous* for instance you can write some code now, stop for an hour and start again, but you still need to be sync-ed with others in a few-days time frame in general. You can pack customers orders at an irregular peace but they want them delivered so you should anyway produce something fast enough. Something MUST be synchronous, a doctor can't cure a patient asynchronously. A dentist can't fill a tooth cavity asynchronously with the patient.
That's can be called flexible scheduling, the opposite of the most current industrial just-in-time model. Drop the just-in-time model means more smartness, knowledge, decision power is needed at every level of the process, like Toyota win against Ford, like we have done in the past and we have tried to stop in the relatively recent time to centralize power.
The centralization theory was designed basically because some see automation as a way to satisfy their thirst for power, cutting intermediate hierarchies and rule as ancient absolute monarch, formally with the justification that dictatorship make decisions faster then Democracies. Such theory prove again to be a scam, we can't sustain for long. Complex hierarchies of course have their issues, but thanks to automation and TLCs we can overcome many of them. Only we need *distributed* knowledge, culture, power, like the ITs of early pioneering days have foresee for a bright future. Unfortunately modern management/politicians/finance cohorts hate such model as they hate Democracy.
The real fallacy is that yes, dictatorships are faster IF they came from a non-dictatorship background. Nazi scientist realize a big advance in knowledge BUT they was not born/educated under the nazi regime. That's the point. It's about time to switch from the "infinite growth model" to the "infinite evolution model".
small but important correction...
> However, when society industrialised, a rigid, five-day, 40-hour workweek arose in factory settings
ummm... no. More like the 6 day 16 hour per day work-week arose in factory settings.
The five-day, 40-hour workweek was fought and died for by the labor movement.
And Henry Ford.
Didn't actually die for the 40-hour work week, but he did institute one at Ford, possibly because he thought it would increase productivity vs. a 48-hour week and drive demand for cars since workers would drive places on the weekends.
The 8 hour day [0] did not happen because employers were nice, it was a hard, often bloody, fight in countries all over the world. Spain put it into law in the 16th century, most of the world didn’t get it until the early 20th century.
Increases in productivity probably help, but you could say the same thing about the last 30 years — a time when globally wage growth has been flat for most.
Time again, history shows labor rights are demanded not given, except for the few industries where people are most valuable asset of a company.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
If the length of our work week followed productivity, the workweek would be at 13 hours today. Your claim is completely and utterly baseless.
You can easily work 13 hours a week if you are willing to enjoy early 20th century living standards! The gains from productivity are distributed between extra leisure time and extra material benefits.
Ah yes, the 20th century standard of owning a home with land and providing for a family of 8, easily affordable on 13 hrs per week.
In the middle of nowhere with no car or household appliances or health care where half of your food comes out of your garden, of course you can afford that.
You could also afford to live in a fire trap tenement house with your family of 8 in two bedrooms, although said houses are now illegal so you probably can't physically do that anymore.
When has providing for a family of eight been the norm in america? I assume you're thinking something like two kids plus all four grandparents living under one roof? That's never been the norm.
Most of the 1600s and 1700s for New England. Quebec for longer, possibly the end of unit 1800s. That’s average number of children per woman, not an extended family. 1800s Ireland, which was probably poorer than the US has been since 1600 had similar fertility.
I still wouldn't say that is the norm, since the infant mortality rate was ~40%. And, if you're producing a baby every 2 years, by the time you're on your 8th baby, your first-borns, should they have lived, would be nearly able-bodied adults with the ability to also work a bit to help support the household or going out and getting married.
And landlords. Productivity improvements get baked into the price of land.
Productivity gains do not lead to increased worker benefit, they lead to increased owner benefit. Organized labor leads to increased worker benefit.
Nah, depends on the ability to coordinate. Communist governments can suppress wages even with enormous productivity gains, like post 1949 Shanghai. Capitalists mostly can’t though. Even with non state puppet unions completely illegal as in the PRC or Vietnam competition for workers leads to rises in wages. Maintaining a cartel without being able to enforce contracts to that effect is hard with fewer than 10 conspirators. Once you have more than 100 people bidding for workers’ labour it’s impossible.
Unions aren’t necessary for increasing wages. We can tell from countries that they’re illegal.
Unions are necessary, as we see when we look at the US. As productivity has increased workers are receiving a smaller and smaller piece of the resulting wealth. Not coincidentally labor is less organized now than it has been in almost a century. If you have power you get resources, simple as that. Individual workers usually have almost no power - they may get a little bit of power temporarily when their skill is heavily in demand but that isn't enough to counteract the inherent power imbalance capital possesses.
This is demonstrably untrue - looking at the tech industry for example. Salaries are enormous with no unions.
You shouldn’t state opinions as fact.
I think you've misinterpreted GP. Tech salaries started high, and that is mostly a scarcity problem. The market will correct that in due time without labor organizing because the profits go to the owners, not the workers. The owners are the ones who decide what happens with the profit (reinvestment, their employees' wages, their own wages, etc.).
Yes, with a powerful union you can restrict entry so there are fewer workers. The workers who are allowed in get a better deal. The people who are kept out by the union suffer and the consumers suffer through lower production and higher prices.
It's not necessary to restrict the number of workers - only to refuse to work if the owners allocate too little of the resulting profits back to the workers. This is in fact the whole point of a union.
No need for that. The golden c64 generation will start with early retirements in a few years. Younger generations have less interest in IT (on average) and will yield fewer and fewer tech workers.
What I describe is the mechanism by which unions increase wages for their members. It would be good if you could explain what you were trying to say and its relevance.
Less workers means scarcity and implies better wages and conditions.
Yes. You get less workers by restricting entry. That reduces output but increases union workers bargaining power, making society generally poorer but the members of the union richer.
This greatly depends on which part of the 'tech' industry you're in. Yes, if you're at the top, salaries are enormous, but uh, vast majority of people in 'tech' are not receiving enormous salaries.
You comment is greyed out, even if it's correct. At least your holding up a flag for the remnant.
in tech, we don't really have 40hr/wk. It's more like 80hr/wk. And work on weekends. If you have a position that requires 40hrs/wk or less and no work on weekends whatsoever, consider yourself lucky. I hear stories about colleagues being overworked on continuous basis.
Speak for yourself. The vast majority of engineers I know (in the US and Europe) don't do more than 40 hours a week and without weekends, and oftentimes many work even fewer hours, perhaps even 20 hours a week. There are also so many jobs that if you're truly doing more than 40, that's because you want to or at least haven't bothered to start looking to switch jobs.
> If you have a position that requires 40hrs/wk or less and no work on weekends whatsoever, consider yourself lucky.
That's backwards. If you have a position that requires over 40hrs/wk, or any weekend work without overtime pay, consider yourself exploited (and if you're doing it without it being required, consider yourself a scab). Join a union, quit that job, or both.
If you have sufficient equity upside, it’s not unreasonable to put in “extra” time to grow the company.
Agreed if you have real equity ownership (at which point you're not really a worker). Some stock options isn't the same thing.
It's definitely not unreasonable, but nor is /not/ growing the business in order to control one's own working hours.
And in general, if growth is dependent on this, then there is no plan and you should value the equity accordingly.
And meanwhile I hear stories of people clocking in 40 hour weeks on a continuous basis. The reality is that both exist.
Somehow, I've managed to work 40/hr week or less at all of my jobs.
Recently, due to a disability, I've been limited to a max of 40 hr/wk with a restricted schedule (M-F 0800-1800). Unfortunately, I can't do on-call and no matter how severe an incident is in the middle of the night, I'm not available.
No one has an issue with this. In a funny way, it's good I'm on the team because we're always testing the "Kayodé bus factor". Thus far, it's been more than 1.
That is most definitely not the case in Australia. I'm a dev, I never work weekends. I do sometimes work later in the day meaning some weeks are probably a bit more than 40 hours, but I also take long lunch breaks or leave early so some weeks are also probably slightly less. This is the case for all the devs I know as well, and more than a small amount of regular OT is seen as cause to quit and get work elsewhere.
There is an exception for dev managers, who seem to work longer hours generally but definitely nothing approaching 80 hours
In countries where labor laws are strong working more than 40 hours a week in a salaried role is not common. And when there is overtime, it’s often taken in lieu and expected that you get those hours back out of your regular day.
If you have a position that requires more than 40 hours a week regularly, do the math on your hourly rate, and look at hour its affecting your health. If you’re under 25 you’ll probably get away with it, if not the second order impacts on your life are not insignificant, and can make you less productive.
I assume this is referring to the US?
I don’t know anyone who does much over 40 hours in the UK, let alone anything close to 80 hours. A few might pick up urgent tasks on the weekend, but only when needed and not regularly.
I think also depends where in the US. In Seattle, a lot of tech workers are with Amazon. When I worked with Amazon, over two years, there were perhaps two weeks total where I worked less than 50 hours. In that job, and in several that followed, the office was for collaboration, meetings, maybe an hour of actual work, and then at home was where the second workday began in a quiet setting & you put in 3-5 hours additional coding (plus whatever on-call threw at you).
I've worked for US companies on their EU offices for nearly 10 years, and there's definitely much less of it here, but I've definitely ran into some US employees who have been less than impressed at how unavailable I am outside hours in that time
What the hell kind of sweatshop are you working in? Never seen anything remotely like this.
> And work on weekends
I read that Tim Cook has a weekly Sunday evening meeting with his staff; this seems reasonable, since that time might otherwise be wasted on family, friends, or home responsibilities - rather than taking care of critically important Apple business that can't wait until Monday morning.
Sunday evening in California is Monday morning in Asia - if you wait until Monday morning in CA to start things off you burn a whole day.
Now, I doubt Tim is happy with people leaving early on Friday afternoon either - but given Apple’s business and the importance of the Asian supply chain, a Sunday evening meeting is justified.
Also anyone reporting directly to Tim Cook is being paid tens of millions per year for their trouble…
i don’t understand this meme. is it some job-security/gate-keeping attempt, based on scaring new people away from the industry?
You should really try to find a new job. Crazy hours outside of some startups and super high paying jobs in a few sectors are not the norm in tech. Most people I know in the industry in NYC work 35-40 and do just fine.