41–50 of 103 posts
This is the takeaway from the article. Hours worked != delivered value. One of many reasons I've always steered consulting engagements towards another compensation model, e.g. weekly retainer fees.
"You shouldn't work long hours" is consensus advice masquerading as contrarian advice. You can see this for two reasons: (i) count the number of people in threads like this who advise against working long hours; (ii) go to Amazon.com and count the number of books that advocate (often using empirical evidence) against working long hours. The same is true for "you shouldn't multitask". Everyone thinks they're clever fo…
Can some of you chime in with your experience here re: consulting and hours. None of the consultants I know of would estimate a time requirement (other than something incredibly loose) for any kind of job bigger than a few hours. The MO seems to be some version of: "You give me [the consulting firm] a maximum per week that you can afford on this, and we will have a weekly stand up where we talk about what was complet…
The usual model is to budget 3-5x the actual requirements, filling it with knowledge transfer and other complete the work you can accomplish yourself as early as possible and and milk as long as possible.
Can some of you chime in with your experience here re: consulting and hours. None of the consultants I know of would estimate a time requirement (other than something incredibly loose) for any kind of job bigger than a few hours. The MO seems to be some version of: "You give me [the consulting firm] a maximum per week that you can afford on this, and we will have a weekly stand up where we talk about what was complet…
Business works great making the Model T Ford on an assembly line. A small improvement to the assembly line will cost X and result in Y more cars being built. If you need to make more cars it costs N to make a whole new line. All easy to budget for and the business becomes easy - no surprises, not failed projects. Of course as Henry Ford discovered the hard way (apparently more than once) eventually your competition will invest in something a little more open ended that will produce results.
It’s not the working hours that take the toll on you but the lifestyle in general. Just consider this from the article: “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said
Yes, I did that too. You’re dead zombie walking after a couple of weeks getting up at 4:30am just to be back at 5/6pm to play with the kids, catch up on mails and calls you’ve missed after the family went to bed until 11/12 or even 1am just to get up at 4:30am again for the next round
This makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen anecdotally, it seems most people can work 80-hour weeks at full productivity for maybe one or two weeks, tops. After that, the fatigue starts to set in and that person's performance starts to decline. In the long run, the person working 80 hour weeks isn't getting much more done than someone working far fewer hours, simply because during those 80 hours they are ope…
Depends. There was a time in my 30s(IIRC) where I had 3 contracts going at the same time. It was exhilarating. My mind was constantly humming and I was really into it. I was pulling about 80 hours a week for a few months. It really depends on the type of work and how much it engages you.
Imagine having to continue working like that.
I'd like to think that programmers have a creative or even artistic occupation (personally I'm more manager than programmer these days). Forcing something creative out is rarely good or even possible. The majority of the employees in my organization are in sales. There's a limit to where you can push that for most people too, but it is a different kind of limit.
Personally I've only put in proper 80-hour work weeks something like three times working as a disillusioned startup "employee" or as a consultant in extreme crunch because of launch marketing costs. Sure, something is deployed and it you certainly feel a sense of accomplishment but it's not something that should be used by any serious company expecting people to stay longer than a year or two.
With that said: people checking/answering their email or checking error logs at odd hours "for free" really do bring value to a company though.
In a typical 40 hour work week, it'd take me 80 hour 'of time at work' to actually get the 40 hours of actual work, meaning most weeks, I might to 18-25 hours of actual work.
The issue, I think here, is requiring people to go to a place, to do a thing, for X hours per week - given the ability to be flexible about working hours, most people will do more, in less time, and be more available for customer needs.
When I was hired as a consultant, the very first day I was asked to give an estimate on how long it will take me to complete the project. (Coincidentally, it was for a New York Times) I spent my time studying the code base and the requirement. By the end of the day, I told them around ~20 hours. It was a fairly easy project. I spent a month and a half to complete the project. What I didn't take into account was how l…