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How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

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Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#191

Post by guy_c »

matthewborden wrote: post #22

If you need your employees to work 60-80 hours per week, you need to evaluate your business plan and if it's actually viable.

Yep!!!!

Lets imagine that overtime gets you 50% more productive output.

If your business plan requires 50% more output and you cannot afford to just hire 50% more people then it sounds like you are running a business with very tight margins.

Plenty of other things could raise your staff costs 50% and put you out of business. How about the higher staff turnover from burning out staff? Now you're paying your recruitment consultant more in fees and the extra cost of training and on-boarding new staff.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#192

Post by fatso83 »

jpindar wrote: post #181
tomsmeding wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds horrible. I'm still at university anyway, but it seems to me that there should be a mechanism for detecting these companies and shutting them down , if they don't recover. I sincerely hope you'll find a job (industry, academia or otherwise) doing something you like doing in a place that you like. Good luck!

Let's be clear. By "shutting them down", you mean legally prohibiting anyone from voluntarily agreeing to work differently than one university student (who doesn't even work there) would prefer, am I right? What should be the penalty for those who try to do it anyway?

Because "voluntary" is only just that as long as you have many other options and can easily get away from such a place. In most industries that kind of job security/market fluidity that just isn't the case. Workplace standards are there to protect workers from being exploited. In much of Western Europe the work week is standardized to 40h/w.You can work overtime, but only within certain boundaries for shorter and longer aggregated periods to avoid every day being crunch time.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#193

Post by fatso83 »

mack73 wrote: post #131
grecy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the detailed reply, I appreciate it. As a thought exercise, answer all of my questions above for the USA, comparing the answers to those you gave for Sweden. Now you know why I said workers in the USA are akin to slaves compared to high-performing OECD countries.

Yes, in Sweden we have laws that protect the employer to a much higher degree and we also have a very static work force. You can easily go this route: learn something, get a job, don't steal or do anything criminal, keep that job until you die or get replaced by a robot. And many do. And get very anxious at the prospect of ever changing occupation because of their mortage. I job-hop alot though (without anxiety, beca…

I think you mean employee (arbetar), not employer (arbetsgivare).

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#194

Post by mack73 »

fatso83 wrote: post #193
mack73 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in Sweden we have laws that protect the employer to a much higher degree and we also have a very static work force. You can easily go this route: learn something, get a job, don't steal or do anything criminal, keep that job until you die or get replaced by a robot. And many do. And get very anxious at the prospect of ever changing occupation because of their mortage. I job-hop alot though (without anxiety, beca…

I think you mean employee (arbetar), not employer (arbetsgivare).

Yes you are right. I mix up those to.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#195

Post by mack73 »

hexointed wrote: post #121
grecy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside of NA are scared of loosing their jobs, is what you believe, because of how enslaved to the system Americans are? I didn't say nobody , and I didn't say everywhere outside America. Don't exaggerate what I said. I used an example that Australia Vs. America is a vast difference. In my experience (and that of my brother), Americans not having maternity leave, sick leave, decent holidays etc. and having…

I'm currently studying in Sweden. I think mack73 comment was slightly exaggerated. - Health care insurance is not (as far as I know) provided by your employer. - If you take the maximum amount of student loan from CSN ( http://www.csn.se/en/2.1034 ), you'll end up whith ~70 000kr debt per year - Swedish law mandates 25 day of paid leave per year for a full time employee. https://lagen.nu/1977:480 (in Swedish) - We ha…

Yes and it was also a while ago since I studied. Your numbers seem correct. Extra health insurance is often provided to you by your employer though. With standard health care a broken leg is the same price as an ear infection. Extra insurance in some cases equal a doctors apointment within the hour instead of waiting a day or so. 25 days = 5 working weeks. Our parental leave is outstanding.

My point was not to say we have not come a long way in Sweden. It was to question if that really makes us feel less like slaves to the system. My view is we have built this system to make sure we have a happy work force. Allthough that might not sound sinister, it does make me feel part of a system that it is hard to opt-out from.

I definetly feel like a slave to the monetary system. But this is already way off-topic.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#196

Post by hnnsj »

canes123456 wrote: post #190
hnnsj wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online productivity tools. No investments, profitable, linear but steady growth, minimal marketing, small team size, close to zero process. Works great for us programmers. And the CEO does a lot of programming as well, if I'd venture a guess I'd say about 40-50%.

I still can't imagine that this makes sense. Even if everyone is a developer on paper, you should be spending more time on all the other parts of running a company. CEO still writing code half of the time when everyone else is writing code all the time puts it over the edge. Don't you also need Designers, QA, Ops, Marketing, or CFO?

You might find it hard to imagine, but that's how it is. I can't say exactly how much time the CEO spends on other tasks out of office, but I know that he at least does a lot of coding while he's at the office (which is most of the time). As I said, we have a minimal amount of support issues and marketing. We also don't do meetings. We don't spend a ton of time on design, and when we do, everyone participates. But that's a very small amount of time compared to the time we spend writing (or thinking/talking about) code. QA is part of the coding process. CFO is outsourced/done by the CEO. The point is, all the developers except the CEO spends at least 90% of their time coding (in pairs).

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#197

Post by koonsolo »

Steve Blank has a nice article about this: https://steveblank.com/2016/09/07/working-hard-is-not-the-sa...

“Our team knows this isn’t a 9-5 company. We stay as long as it takes to get the job done.”

...the front door of the company opened – and a first trickle of employees left. I asked, “Are these your VPs and senior managers?” He nodded looking surprised and kept watching. Then after another 10-minute pause, a stream of employees poured out of the building like ants emptying the nest. Rahul’s jaw dropped and then tightened. Within a half-hour the parking lot was empty.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#198

Post by therealdrag0 »

tensor wrote: post #62
houst0n_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is 'they' in that case? They for me is whoever is paying us to help them with their business. If it's the contractors/team members then no. Ive unfortunately had several highly paid (4 figures uk/day) contractors who think themselves above certain tasks, or who refuse to do anything they didn't agree with who seem surprised when they get told to fuck off. You're an overpaid contract dev and you're refusing to imp…

I downvoted you for arrogance. You obviously think your are better than those you "manage." Are you technical? Can you sling assembly? Ok, what about C? C++ maybe? I'm guessing you can't do any of that. Can you back up your talk?

I don't think any of your questions are relevant. He has expressed protecting his employees and he protects his work contracts. That's his job. If an employee cares more about getting his/her way than serving the customer, the manager has the right to not put up with that. And that has nothing to do with how technical either of them are.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#199

Post by psyc »

YALocksmith wrote: post #153
psyc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ide…

Sounds great. But how many years will that carry on for? Surely whatever you're choosing will be complete in the next month or two of 80 hour weeks?

It's been going on for a year, and will likely be done this month. So yes, there's maybe an end. Maybe. But it was extremely enjoyable, not something I'm looking forward to ending, like a crunch at an employer.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#200

Post by houst0n_ »

tensor wrote: post #62
houst0n_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is 'they' in that case? They for me is whoever is paying us to help them with their business. If it's the contractors/team members then no. Ive unfortunately had several highly paid (4 figures uk/day) contractors who think themselves above certain tasks, or who refuse to do anything they didn't agree with who seem surprised when they get told to fuck off. You're an overpaid contract dev and you're refusing to imp…

I downvoted you for arrogance. You obviously think your are better than those you "manage." Are you technical? Can you sling assembly? Ok, what about C? C++ maybe? I'm guessing you can't do any of that. Can you back up your talk?

Well fair enough.

I don't consider myself better then my team when taken as a whole, however I am the lead for a reason and I'm much closer aligned on how to maximise what we're delivering to the client as I have to actually deal with them. The reasons why I sometimes have to pick a worse solution to a problem are obvious to me but not always to my team, but that's the way it goes and I'm the boss.

An example? Once we had a requirement to have a user store for some group of apps and we came up with a really nice ldap solution, and two members of the team were really invested in the solution and the debates were endless on some technical details of the implementation. It was beautiful, as these things go.

Then I find out that there's an existing AD environment we can just hook up to instead of reimplementing functionality that already exists so I shitcan the project.

Does that make me arrogant or good at my job? My job is to help my clients, spending a few months implementing something that already exists just because some of my tech staff prefer our solution is not helping my client, yet these two members refused to implement the Code to interface the existing environment.

Disagreements happen, but refusing to do work you disagree with when you're a contracted professional is unacceptable.

As for my tech credentials, yeah I did a bit of ia32 back in the days where one might want to use 16 bit registers to avoid nulls if you get what I mean, wink wink, but never for profit. C? Yes, I was a c developer and I maintained boost on Solaris for a few years while maintaining as much ingnorance of c++ as possible and not really understanding any of it (mostly a packaging gig).

Today, we are further up the stack but I don't think it has much relevance.

I don't make unpopular decisions because I don't understand what the consequences are which seems to be your take; I just pick the battles we should be fighting for our clients and my comment was that I have little time for people who can't put the client ahead of what they want to work on.

You are hired for your technical ability but that's to further the goals of your client. You aren't working on your side project and refusing to work on things, even those we all don't want to be doing but which further our clients goals is unprofessional and I have no problem saying goodbye to those who do.

Its good to be strongly opinionated. Discussion is great. Multiple solutions and experimenting are good. Your design doesn't happen for some reason (and like above, it might not be because it's not the best solution) that doesn't mean you don't look like a spoiled child refusing to do what you're getting £1000/day to do, and unfortunately this attitude is more prevalent than you'd think.

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