Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

programmers.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 172 posts

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#41

Post by sliverstorm »

How about in a cyclical project start -> project release process?

I am not referring to "crunch time" where you realize everything is broken and your schedule was unrealistic; rather, many projects I have participated in have an escalating work load as you near release, because a lot of the work simply cannot be done before previous stages are completed.

Unless you are a large entity that can heavily "pipeline" by running 10 or 20 projects at once, and shuffle people around as a project's workload changes, to avoid ever working overtime you'd need to either have to hire too many employees, or hire/fire regularly. Not entirely dissimilar to trying to balance a server cluster with load spikes.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#42

Post by gaustin »

gte910h wrote: post #31
mburney wrote: post #5

I'm curious how efficient most coders are even in an 8 hour work day. I find that I can only log about 4 - 5 hours a day (on average) of solid coding time (or marketing/business work). This is because I limit myself to an 8 hour work day, but of course there are breaks and inevitable down time.

Yeah, I get crap using those numbers on estimates. I still don't redo math because people dislike them though.

Same here. But somehow the numbers always get recalculated when they pass through my supervisor's hands.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#43

Post by DougWebb »

Hisoka wrote: post #7

It's nice that LinkedIn has a great process: regression testing and the like, but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every single little thing, and where business models, let alone requirements change constantly (ie. a startup)? What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours? What if there is a mission-cri…

If a feature can be duplicated in 48 hours, it's a trivial feature. If your business is that dependent on trivial features, it's a really precarious business.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#44

Post by djb_hackernews »

orlick wrote: post #11
mburney wrote: post #5

I'm curious how efficient most coders are even in an 8 hour work day. I find that I can only log about 4 - 5 hours a day (on average) of solid coding time (or marketing/business work). This is because I limit myself to an 8 hour work day, but of course there are breaks and inevitable down time.

Our startup team of 10 has kept pretty strict time logs for the past 3 years. We have an official policy of 40 hour work weeks, but yeah, no developers are able to have that much productive time. Usually we see about 25-30 hours of solid development time, 5 hours of meeting/admin time, and 5 hours of lunches/coffee/break time.

I'd like to hear more about the choice to keep strict time logs in a startup environment. Especially strict ones that provide enough granularity to see 5 hours of break time/wk.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#45

Post by trb »

swombat wrote: post #30
edw519 wrote: post #13

What do long hours often represent? Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users. Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources. Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.

That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-) He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management. I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or f…

Don't you think it's a bit unfair to call everyone who works long hours incompetent? I've seen point two that edw519 made a few times. If there's not enough work to pay for another employee, but just enough to pay for your kids college tuition if you make a lot of overtime, what should you do? Growing your business can take years before you can relax a little.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#46

Post by webwright »

swombat wrote: post #30
edw519 wrote: post #13

What do long hours often represent? Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users. Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources. Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.

That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-) He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management. I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or f…

"If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent')."

Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the money. But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted to) the game they are playing.

Whoever you're competing with, you've probably got competitors smarter than you and willing to put in long hours. If you're playing to win (many people do, for a lot of reasons), how do you propose to beat them?

To anticipate a common argument: Yes, working hard can lead to stress/bad decisions/burnout. But empirically, it seems to correlate pretty strongly with success.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#47

Post by mattmanser »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #17
Hisoka wrote: post #7

It's nice that LinkedIn has a great process: regression testing and the like, but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every single little thing, and where business models, let alone requirements change constantly (ie. a startup)? What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours? What if there is a mission-cri…

What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours? Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days, I am pretty sure this has never happened.

Facebook suddenly rushing out stuff as Google+ launches.

Reddit having to work crazy to take up the exodus from Digg.

That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I honestly can't remember your name!).

Perpetuum having a mass of new players because of the Eve monocle incident.

I'm sure others can think of times when one business has had to react rapidly to either manoeuvres or failures of another business.

Not quite put out of business, but massive opportunity cost if the reaction is not made.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#48

Post by Androsynth »

warmfuzzykitten wrote: post #32

Process schmoces. Any time I work long hours it's a sign I want to work long hours. Sometimes you're hot and you just don't want to stop.

I'm like this also, but would you be hot for 60 hours a week for a year? I think the op is referring to extending time periods.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#49

Post by T-hawk »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #9

I know a lot of people who seem to like working long hours. It allows them to think they're getting more done, but I suspect that many of the processes involved could be optimized if they thought about it a bit. For me, I work long hours but it's spread out over the course of a day (so removing breaks/bs it's probably not much more than 40 hours p/wk), and I love what I do, so I do get a lot done (and it feels less l…

I've known at least a few guys who did indeed like working long hours in the office, since that was less stressful than going home to a house full of cranky kids at bedtime. One co-worker even relished his 1.5 hour commute as the only relaxing parts of his day.

I often like to hang around the office to take care of personal business-but-not-work stuff between 6 and 7 pm. Things like personal finance, doing accounting for this one volunteer organization (I'm treasurer), browsing and booking personal travel. I never want to do that stuff once I'm at home, so putting that into the 6-7 pm window both lowers temptation to do it during the business workday and pushes out an urge to keep working on work stuff late.

Re: "Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

#50

Post by bluekeybox »

webwright wrote: post #46
swombat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-) He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management. I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or f…

"If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent')." Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the money. But I think most of them do…

> But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted to) the game they are playing.

Of course, as Gordon Gecko would say, "it's never been about the money -- it's about the game."

Post reply on HN