61–70 of 236 posts
At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-e…
I wonder if the productivity is maintained as we can only think for so many hours a day. If you look at famous writers such as Hemingway they only worked for a few hours a day. So the question is how does this translate to work that has a less cognitive load ? Has anybody done experiments with programing and hours worked ?
I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get…
That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off. 9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off. They're both popular in defense and aerospace.
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Bit of a Catch-22 problem, don't you think?
How? You experiment on something for 5 years and then report. In my case of reading books: you read books and 5 years later you know what stuck and reread it in order to get the full wisdom out of it. It helped that I studied for 8 years and reflected on these kind of things every year.
Maybe people are being more productive each day because they're aware that the company is going to be measuring their productivity.
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40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and fort…
Please provide a citation to some scholarly or historical work to that effect. The last time I looked into this any way seriously there was nothing suggesting 40 hours was chosen for reasons of productivity. One of the extremely few studies that was decent was of productivity on building sites which found that total (not average) productivity increased up until 60 hour weeks.
The optimum must depend strongly on what work you are doing, how expensive tired mistakes are to fix, how much downtime there is waiting for someone else, etc.
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40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and fort…
Please provide a citation to some scholarly or historical work to that effect. The last time I looked into this any way seriously there was nothing suggesting 40 hours was chosen for reasons of productivity. One of the extremely few studies that was decent was of productivity on building sites which found that total (not average) productivity increased up until 60 hour weeks.
I'm skeptical that this study is any better than whatever studies may have got us here in the first place. 4 day work weeks seem as arbitrary as as what we have now. If happiness and well-being is productive, then a 3 day work week might even be better. Some might be more productive by never working at all.
> One of the extremely few studies that was decent was of productivity on building sites which found that total (not average) productivity increased up until 60 hour weeks.
Taylorism?
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How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.
This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.
I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off.
I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.
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This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.
You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way. I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off. I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.
"Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.
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But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.
You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did. Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win: "I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs…