101–110 of 253 posts
The book mentions "Percentage of tickets closed" as a metric by which engineering should be evaluated, which IMO is incredibly short-sighted. The Google Doc has all editing disabled at the moment, but does anyone know if the author would welcome improvements to the text?
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Being a founder isn’t about writing code all day - you don’t have to be operating at full mental capacity to be getting stuff done. You spend a ton of time talking to people, recruiting, writing emails, etc. IMO the notion that you can be more effective as a founder in I’m sure there are diminishing returns at some point, but I don’t think it’s before 8 hrs/day.
Being a founder is irrelevant, he's talking about pushing his workers to work those hours, not about his personal schedule.
The hardest part of being in a company is almost always coordination and communication.
I read the comments before clicking the link, and found myself agreeing with commenters who complained about this line: > In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be. I almost dismissed the book as a "yet another VC-driven, work-your-people-to-burnout story" but really, there's more to that. I've found it an excellent read…
Why is everyone disliking this statement about 8-10 hours a day? Excluding weekends, this is 40-50 hours a week, nothing outrageous. You're not that special folks, you have to work to get paid like everyone else.
I think the main problem is that founders often don't have clear rules when they are 'working'. Especially, it is very hard to quantify the 'readiness' aspect of their work.
Nevertheless, in my opinion there is nothing wrong in trying to achieve the 8 hours per day (mixed focus work) while trying to explicitly define non-working hours to get the required rest.
Download as .doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZJZbv4J6FZ8Dnb0JuMhJxTnw...
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It's almost impossible to be productive 100% of the time. Even with just 2h for lunch and all other crap, to get 9h of productive time you're taking about entering at 9AM and leaving at 8PM. No, thanks.
Being a founder isn’t about writing code all day - you don’t have to be operating at full mental capacity to be getting stuff done. You spend a ton of time talking to people, recruiting, writing emails, etc. IMO the notion that you can be more effective as a founder in I’m sure there are diminishing returns at some point, but I don’t think it’s before 8 hrs/day.
If so I think he was also pretending the whole dev team should have 10hours/day of real productivity
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I think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.
Second this. Morning is the best for clear thinking. Late night work is less productive.
I guess each person has a different time of best performance, the problem is when you get a job in a office without flexible hours.
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Being a founder is irrelevant, he's talking about pushing his workers to work those hours, not about his personal schedule.
Ok fair, but are you aware of any position that is devoid of administrative tasks or meetings? The hardest part of being in a company is almost always coordination and communication.
> In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be. So, are people expected to be in the office for 12+ hours a day? Nobody is 100% productive from the moment they step in the door, every day. The fact that the author even wrote the number 10 here makes me a bit angry. I'm only about 1/4 of the way through, does he have a sectio…
You definitely should read the whole thing with more attention to this aspect - getting productive hours out of employees is an extremely difficult task, but it does pay off big time. This can be achieved with the "fun" environment at work, with meals at the office, with very clear goals and alignment on those goals, with a bigger ambition in mind, with creative compensation schemes, flexible hours, remote work schem…
Between meetings, chatty coworkers, meals, coffee breaks, and just periodic mental fatigue, I think 5-6 hours of productivity is a much more feasible goal for an 8-hour work day.
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Ok fair, but are you aware of any position that is devoid of administrative tasks or meetings? The hardest part of being in a company is almost always coordination and communication.
That's exactly my point; he shouldn't expect 8-9h of productive time from his workers, because there are always administrative tasks and meetings (not to mention more lowly vital necessities), and so that implies they're basically living in the company.
I read the comments before clicking the link, and found myself agreeing with commenters who complained about this line: > In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be. I almost dismissed the book as a "yet another VC-driven, work-your-people-to-burnout story" but really, there's more to that. I've found it an excellent read…
I track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.
If you’re an engineer not all of your productive hours are writing code.