A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour • Hacker News Board

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#161

Post by yulaow » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #146

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #56

This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…

Indeed... And most of the friends around me who made it big also played it hard. When Broadcom was nowhere several employees number xxx (with xxx less than 300) were, while in crunch-mode, sleeping in their trucks , on the parking lot, to deliver chip plans on time. Stock options have been good for them the day Broadcom was worth $12bn. I've got a few friends who started a 3D-rendering business for TV ads, short movi…

Here we are talking about the fact that "more productivity" is not linearly proportional to "more hours spent". Rather, more hours you spent working (over a certain limit), less is your productivity. And more days you spend these more-hours, far less you will be productive.

In the end the psychologist want to stress the fact that working 80 hours is EQUAL productive to working 40-45, already in the short term! (and they get LESS productive in the mid-long term) With the difference that working the right amount of hours do not cause burn-out and illness.

Again, with a good management capable of understand this, those successful companies would be equal successful today BUT without causing so much pain to their employees back in the days.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#162

Post by Codhisattva » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

overgryphon wrote: post #160

From a manager perspective, you wouldn't want an employee working 60+ hours on a regular basis. When actual crunch-time happened, that employee wouldn't have room to work more. You likely wouldn't be able to meet expectations, because your under-staffing problem had been hidden by regularly overworking some employees.

Crunch time is a management anti-pattern.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#163

Post by dwaltrip » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:07 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #40

This article doesn't pass the smell test. There is nothing magical about 40 hours per week. 60 hours is just as arbitrary as 40. Also, it probably originated when people did actual physical labor, and so it wont apply to dev work. Countless people in the sciences have toiled day and night to bring about great discoveries - and that's a good thing. Question: Do non-software people (I'm thinking Scientists, Mathematici…

60 is not "just as arbitrary as 40". The human body has very real constraints.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#164

Post by alexeisadeski3 » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:12 PM UTC

cdcarter wrote: post #152

zanny wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't mean that you are suited for 40 hours a week. It just means you have no option but to overwork yourself.

Correct. It's not an option.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#165

Post by coherentpony » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:14 PM UTC

Try telling this to anybody in academia. Your funding is based on your deliverables, not the number of hours you work.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#166

Post by lutusp » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:30 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #151

lutusp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to call psychology a pseudoscience confuses either the definition of science or of psychology. It certainly doesn't call into question the definition of science -- that's well-established by a consensus among scientists. The consensus is secure enough that science is now written into law, for example laws meant to prevent Creationism from being taught as science in science classrooms. Here is an excerpt from on…

> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") That's not what falsifiable means. > I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works. That statement, taken…

>> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world")

> That's not what falsifiable means.

You truncated the original, cut out an essential word, then argued against the edited version. Here's what I said:

> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its claims. [emphasis added]

In point of fact, empirical, falsifiable evidence is the only legitimate basis for theories that should be discarded if reality disagrees, and on which the notion of falsifiability depends -- that's how it's defined.

The meaning of falsifiability is that a reality test decides whether a given idea has merit, not philosophical weight or rhetorical argument. And if the reality test fails, a scientist discards the failed idea. A pseudoscientist may elect to discard reality instead.

> Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works.

Yes, and on that basis I can claim that my idea is falsifiable. But until I take the daring step of trying to explain what I have described, I haven't crossed the threshold of science.

That's why I use this example -- it has empirical evidence, it is falsifiable, it is replicable by dispassionate third parties. It has everything that psychology recognizes as science, except the crucial element of theory, of explanation. Because psychology is satisfied to describe without making an effort to explain, so am I.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#167

Post by AutoCorrect » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:34 PM UTC

MrScruff wrote: post #88

AutoCorrect wrote: post #9

I had a boss tell me at an end of year meeting that another employee had worked 1000 more hours that year than I had. I looked my boss in the eye and said "then he's doing something wrong". Consistent 60 hour weeks is a failure of management and of the employee to better manage their time. Especially if you are salaried.

You happen to work in an industry where working weekends and overtime is the exception. That's not always the case.

I work in the IT business - there are plenty of times when weekend work is the only way to get something done (don't get me started on broken architecture that precludes rolling weekday rollouts). I just take the time away from some other day. And I'm not averse to overtime either, in exceptional circumstances. But for me, salaried means that I do my job as efficiently as possible, and if there's nothing to do, I don't work.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#168

Post by gregholmberg » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:34 PM UTC

We forget so soon. Labor movements within recent memory were fought at great cost to secure the possibility of shorter working hours. People were killed at factory gates trying to get labor laws enacted, in part to reduce employer demands for long working hours.

One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not in the long-term best interests of any participant or the society.

An imbalance in society might show up as (under|un)employment in groups outside the core demographic -- in this case, anyone who is non-20-something, non-male, or non-white, who is not "crushing it" at work after nine on weeknights.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#169

Post by AutoCorrect » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:37 PM UTC

drdeadringer wrote: post #34

AutoCorrect wrote: post #9

I had a boss tell me at an end of year meeting that another employee had worked 1000 more hours that year than I had. I looked my boss in the eye and said "then he's doing something wrong". Consistent 60 hour weeks is a failure of management and of the employee to better manage their time. Especially if you are salaried.

How did your boss respond?

About like you'd expect, he shrugged it off and went on with his meeting.

Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

#170

Post by AutoCorrect » Sat, Feb 15, 2014, 10:40 PM UTC

jewel wrote: post #28

So far I've only accepted jobs that will let me be paid by the hour, instead of salary, with 1.5 times pay for overtime. I feel like it much more reasonably aligns expectations, and in 10+ years of working that way, I've only done a few hours of overtime here or there during true emergencies.

I think that's where the job market has gone wrong in IT: bosses think salaried == enslaved