What Long Hours Really Mean
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What Long Hours Really Mean
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Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#2This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#3Working even half an hour extra each day adds up to ~3 weeks a year of extra work that you're not getting paid for. That's several thousand dollars in wages. It's easy to dismiss a half-hour here or there but if you sit down and run the numbers, it's quite an unpleasant conclusion.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#4This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie.
If you are salaried and you work overtime, you are working for free. If you're on an hourly wage and you don't get any sort of overtime pay, you're working for free.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#5This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie. If you are salaried and you work overtime, yo…
Pay is only one reason for work.
If pay is one's only reason, long hours for no extra pay are certainly objectionable. But that's a circular argument.
I like working long hours when it's work that I want to be doing. If people are working at something they don't want to do, maybe that is the real problem. For menial jobs that no one enjoys, there may be no easy way to fix the situation, but in an industry like tech there is little excuse for accepting it.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#6This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
I tested it back when I ran a dev team.
We were faced by constant pressure to develop customer stuff faster, and the team were doing regular 60+ hour weeks. I put in some new rules on hours, including:
- no dev worked more than 40 hours on scheduled projects. Overtime was for disaster recovery or slippage repair to meet a deadline
- if the salesperson agreed to a new deadline, then we went over their other tasks and worked out what needed to shift to make room. If they insisted on overtime, then we insisted on lieu time to pay it back, from their scheduled project time.
- if someone came in to fix a disaster, we gave them time of in lieu. If we really couldn't do the time off, we paid them overtime for the time.
It took a few months for this to settle in, and I got to test the productivity changes (by measuring project estimates vs actuals). Productivity improved as the hours worked decreased.
The productivity gains came mostly from more realistic project estimates, but a significant part from increased dev productivity... they just wrote better code that needed less correction, faster.
I would post the data, but it's commercially sensitive and about ten years old now.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#7This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie. If you are salaried and you work overtime, yo…
Most large companies will grade you based on your work adjusting bonus and the amount of stock you recive. That way there is at least some monetary incetive for it as well.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#8This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?
>How could one study it objectively?
Here's a fix, and it comes from within: Give up the ideal of objectivity. Objectivity doesn't exist.
I see this fallacy all the time from hackers. We are not merely rational creatures we are also feeling creatures. Embrace it.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#9Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family/leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending. Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don't work harder. The whole "if I don't do this, the project will sink / things will be destroyed" is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers count on.
Re: What Long Hours Really Mean
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can debate until you're blue in the face the claims about poisonous workplace culture, broken management, unreasonable / unsustainable expectations, or other intangible things unmentioned in this piece (like people working extra because they're angling for a promotion, or trying to learn a new job skill that will be valuable in the future) -- but the math doesn't lie. If you are salaried and you work overtime, yo…
Most large companies will grade you based on your work adjusting bonus and the amount of stock you recive. That way there is at least some monetary incetive for it as well.
Working extra hours with that in mind would only be wise if you could accurately predict the reward. It would be a rude surprise if you worked extra hard all year only to hear "Sorry, no performance bonuses this year, our CEOs decided they weren't earning enough."