191–200 of 230 posts
Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
We shouldn't treat productivity like we're robots, we're not switched on working on a repetitive task for all of 8 hours a day.
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No, people would cut the unnecessary BS in order to get things done. Most people can’t concentrate 40h/week, so the BS serves to fill up the remaining time.
Do you think people would be able to maintain 100% productivity when working 20 hours/week?
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I agree about the 4 day week. During Covid may company reduced work hours to 32 and we took off Friday. I definitely felt that people were actually working these hours and meetings were way more focused. Overall i don’t think our release schedule got hurt at all by being less hours at work
Did you return to a 5 day week out of interest? If not I'd love to add the company to https://4dayweek.io/
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Yeah, I think there is a pretty big culture bubble, and know people on both sides. Some people spend most of their life working 60 real hours weeks, especially blue collar work. I have a white collar workplace, and there is a big spread. There are people that do 20 hours of real work and those with a 60+ hour average. I have done 100+ hour weeks of real heads down work & all nighters , but can't/wont do it prolonged.…
> I'm confident that the willingness to pull out the stops and get it done has lead to promotions, raises, and freedom to scale down my workload during slow times. If I had this confidence, I'd put in the hours cheerfully; I've had spells of 80-100 hour weeks in the past and invariably it was caused by sales people or managers over-promising without asking a technical expert, and could have easily been avoided. Doing…
Of course working 60 hours a week on some bullshit project with no impact will not have the same results.
Future of knowledge work [0]: 1. 5-hour work day, not pretending busy work for 8 or even 12 full hours (eg, 996 in China tech corps) Knowledge work, especially creative work, is just different from hard manual labor. More work hours won’t necessarily produce more value For some people / jobs, maybe 2-hour work day is enough. @tobi says it well [1]: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 c…
I’m currently at a top-tier tech company which pays very well but wastes an incredible amount of my time on unnecessary overhead. It would be amazing to get my work done in four hours a day and spend the rest of my time on fulfilling projects and relationships.
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The value-add model is interesting. How would you characterize: 1. An hour-long meeting where architecture is decided 2. Doing investigation/documentation of RCA for an incident 3. Spec reviews with stakeholders who will have to use the product
Right, examples like yours are where it gets interesting. What I think can work is minimizing who needs to be involved in these kind of activities (not to say as few as possible, but only those its relevant too), and looking at how important they are to the desired outcomes, basically understanding how much time they take up vs what the return on the time is. All easier said than done of course.
But it’s tough. As a product manager, I think that the right spec can greatly increase engineering efficiency. If that’s true, and bear with me, spending an extra 20 hours on a spec might save 1000 hours of dev time. Isn’t that the same as making those devs more productive? So do we count that work as 20 hours, or 1000 hours?
I like it in principle but I’m not sure it scales across disciplines.
Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
Such irrationalities have always been present in the institution of wage slavery.
See twitter for an excellent current example of what this looks like.
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In that sense coding is like writing a book. Are you only productive when you actually type the words?
most of my coding time is actually figuring out the right way to do something. breaking the problem down right and then another big chunk is identifying (& 'fixing') interactions with external components. I know those are important things but at some level it feels as if I am not being productive. still I justify it by thinking about the opportunity cost of doing it the wrong way.
Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
"If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell." That's assuming that the work you've been set to do is productive, and you're doing it in a productive manner. For instance, I've spent weeks grinding away on features that never get used by customers. Is that productive? I've also spent hours trying to fix a bug because of infrastructure/platform/tooling constraints that means the code/compile/d…
"No better options" is a hell of a drug, haha.
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I heard Elon does 120 hours a week. /s I haven't seen anyone doing 40 hours a week. At least not more than a week.
> I heard Elon does 120 hours a week. /s It's not exactly hard at his level. He can delegate absolutely everything and cannot be obliged to do anything. He can pick who is around him at all times, and they are usually obligated to cater to his wishes. 120 hours of casual chats, meetings, presentations, shared meals, and travel count as long as it's related to any of his 3 major businesses.