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A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

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Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#31

Post by gjulianm »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #23
david-gpu wrote: post #17

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…

Fully agree. On my last job interview, I sat in front of the committee (about 7 to-be colleagues) and the director. I said: > I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money. Everyone smiled. Except the director. I still got the po…

To be honest, I don't know if I would have said that. I think that employees in "creative" positions (e.g., you're not serving customers at a bar and need to keep the shop open and working) are paid based on the output they produce. Whether that output is produced in 2, 6 or 8 hours is not really their problem. Looking at it this way, they would have happily paid you 100% of your salary for the same output you're now giving them with a 20% discount.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#32

Post by jader201 »

david-gpu wrote: post #17

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…

> The rest of my [5] working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc.

That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email.

Granted, a lot of my day is spent on our internal chat tool (Slack equivalent), so I suppose that’s mostly equivalent to meetings/email. But I would consider that time mostly productive, and certainly don’t feel like it consumes 5 hours of my 8-hour day.

But I do agree with the last two paragraphs (and the general sentiment that a culture of overtime is never good), and to your point, if what you describe feels productive to you, that’s what’s important.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#33

Post by dchftcs »

There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better.

In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious.

The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#34

Post by ipnon »

lijok wrote: post #29

Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company. 1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix pro…

In my experience having a “rockstar” or hero programmer on your team is the surest indication of a management failure, either in velocity, priority, or hiring.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#35

Post by ishtanbul »

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#36

Post by memling »

renegade-otter wrote: post #30
david-gpu wrote: post #17

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…

Working smart vs working hard. Also - optics. Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them. No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the e…

> Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER.

So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#37

Post by daniel-s »

ishtanbul wrote: post #35

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing someb…

Learn Python, automate your work.

Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work.

Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word.

Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use.

If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers.

Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#38

Post by liquidpele »

memling wrote: post #36
renegade-otter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working smart vs working hard. Also - optics. Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them. No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the e…

> Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?

11 or 12 EST is common for west coasters obviously… then if their boss is east coast and an idiot they value them being there “late”

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#39

Post by robinhouston »

The reported results are more nuanced than the headline. Workers who feel pressured to work after hours estimate their own productivity as lower than workers who don't; but workers who choose to work after hours – rather than feeling pressured to do so – report slightly _higher_ productivity.

It's tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#40

Post by zero-sharp »

daniel-s wrote: post #37
ishtanbul wrote: post #35

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing someb…

Learn Python, automate your work. Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work. Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word. Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use. If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers. Any task that you do…

How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work?

He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.

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