51–60 of 88 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds even worse...
how ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall hearing/reading that a lot of the time in the office is passive/suboptimal. The productivity gain is that you have the people there in standby. The gain is that the important work that do happen is not blocked by people being off work since you can pull them in instantly compared to "Only Bob knows X and he left for the day, lets schedule a meeting tomorrow"
Or you could just schedule people to arrive at the same time but have them work shorter hours.
The way I see it is: Bursts of work combined with prolonged pauses because of others' schedules and other issues with coordination
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how ?
Because it eats up more of your day. For me, anyway, short breaks aren't really helpful -- they just serve to derail my "flow" and cause lost time as I ramp back up afterwords. I'd much prefer working straight through and then have a larger single block of time off.
Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code. IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you…
I wouldn't cargo cult everything leaders like Jack Ma propose just because they're highly successful. Sure some 996er's at a company at say, the senior management level can be worth it since you do actually get more work done. Abliet incredibly inefficiently while getting paid the entire time. I don't see how its efficient to have the core of your business being nothing but employees who are working at decreased effi…
Working 12 hours/day is actually more productive for management. Most people look at it from a coder/developer perspective, where more hours does not mean more work given how mentally exhausting the task is and how non-linear the gains are.
(I do not make my technical staff work more than 50 hours a week, and have forced many to take time off / stop working X hours in the office.)
But speaking as a founder/President of a company that has 40 employees, and someone who basically does 40 hours a week of management tasks alone before I do any of my "real job," there is no way I can make my schedule efficient enough to do all my work in 40 hours over 5-6 days. It just cannot happen. I've delegated literally everything I can (I've probably overdelegated to be honest), but senior management just tends to have way more dependencies and a full schedule of corporate partnerships, external sales, marketing, HR tasks, advisery services across various departments, and observation of work and meetings and blah blah blah. I have to work 60 hours/week to get my work done and push the ball forward while I mentor my direct reports and train them. (Typically work 4x12, 1x8, 1x4 WFH).
Yes, a technical worker crushing 996 demonstrably sees exponential dropoff (though I think someone working 80 hours a week still gets more done than someone working 40 hours per week, they just don't get 2x done, probably more like 1.2x), but management is a much different scenario.
Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code. IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you…
https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679...
> heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz highlighted it as a competitive advantage over the United States. It's an issue when the so-called tech heavyweights don't understand the basics of worker productivity in the industry.
EDIT: This post is not in support of 996. Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore?
Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code. IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you…
Intuitively and introspectively I agree with you. But then I ask myself, where are all the successful 30-hour week companies? Why is it that nearly every single successful organization has a culture of long hours? I personally know that I can't sustainably work 10+ hours a day. But the observed results in the real world seem to say something different. It's hard to square that circle, and I'm genuinely interested in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the games industry where passion stands for self exploitation. If you don't push back most employers will take everything they can get.
But the question is, what do they get? Would they develop products faster if the employees worked less?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s true. I heard Chinese internet CTOs saying this about a feature that took a year to launch in NA when they do recruiting in CA: “We can deliver this in two weeks with the same team size”
So? In the UK I and another developer delivered in a month what another part of the companies would take 18 months. And we where physically not allowed to be in the office (BT Princess street) outside normal working hours because embarrassing security cockups six months before involving the Queens unlisted numbers :-)
And then shortly thereafter we both got laid off, and the slower folks kept their jobs.
It is a mistake to believe that the only requirements are the ones that the developers get to see.