Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is 40 hours a week too much?

okta.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 230 posts

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#71

Post by wizofaus »

mkl95 wrote: post #7

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/debug cycle is stupidly slow. Is that productive?

I don't have the slightest doubt I could be a lot more productive than I am now while working less hours. But it's often down to factors that are more or less out of my control.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#72

Post by Apocryphon »

pessimizer wrote: post #32
Apocryphon wrote: post #17

I never realized that Robert Owens' quote codifying eight hours of work is from 1817. Good golly. Our entire industrial mental model of work comes from at least two hundred years ago.

That wasn't an industrial mental model, it was a utopian socialist proposal that took a century and a lot of blood to win.

I mean that the mental model dates from the early Industrial Revolution (I previously thought that it wasn't created until the Gilded Age or the Victorian era), and is overdue to be revised given the rise of white collar work.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#73

Post by swyx »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Great blog post. Does Okta have a four day work week yet? https://www.4dayweek.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-sta...

yeah i was very surprised to see this on an okta domain. you probably shouldn’t be putting out posts like these unless you’re literally announcing a 4 day work week

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#74

Post by ladyattis »

For me, the 40 hour work week is okay but I think the problem at least for development is getting non-technical people to be responsive or provide the necessary input to keep me busy. When I'm support duty for a sprint, I find myself twiddling my thumbs sometimes awaiting a response to a question on a ticket from a user to confirm or get more context for the issue so I can do my work as there's only so much looking at logs, source code, and the like to tease out the cause of the issue.

If anything, I think companies who have more knowledge and process based workers should look to use the free time for learning/studying. Maybe give funds to take courses whether they're online or offline to help such workers (myself included) improve our skill set. I'm not against more free time off for the same pay but I just think there can be more uses of the time than just being off the clock is what I guess I'm saying.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#75

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Personally, I feel that it's too little.

No one is perfectly productive. If you devote 40 hours to something, you're going to spend at least 10-15 hours out of that on non-productive busywork.

There are also some tasks that just require extended periods of focus before something "clicks". No way I could write or code if I was told to pack up and leave after a fixed amount of time.

Also, I've always found that when I'm working hard, I'm more creative in my hobbies as well. I make music as a hobby and whenever I've taken a break from work, the music just doesn't flow.

Caveat: I work for myself so the work is both important and enjoyable to me, and I don't have to deal with office bureaucracies. If I was working for someone else, I might have different views.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#76

Post by janef0421 »

shishy wrote: post #69
hulitu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Medical residents work 80 hours a week. And that's an average over 4 weeks, so they could work 90 easily one week. 40 is nothing...

Medical residents tend to be highly stressed, and these practices were apparently originated by a man who used cocaine in the same manner as coffee.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#77

Post by bitL »

mkl95 wrote: post #7

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.

There are companies in the SW industry that require 40h/week and actually monitor that (e.g. collecting metrics in 10-minute intervals and rejecting intervals with low intensity levels).

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#78

Post by mikrl »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #14
mkl95 wrote: post #7

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.

There are different types of voids. 1. Non work social media. 2. Work socializing (water cooler). 3. External support/collaboration/reviews. 4. Day dreaming not about work. 5. Thinking about work while not “producing” maybe not even at computer. I can work 40 hours where it feels like 10-20 hours are actually working on my “planned” work, but the other time is on #3 and #5 which “feels” like a void but is actually cr…

6. Spiralling

;)

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#79

Post by edwnj »

edwnj wrote: post #64

The real question is how can I short okta.. Some person or group in this company was paid to do this..

actually found it (Nasdaq: OKTA)..

The company lost an insane amount of money each quarter (-46% margin).. The are worth almost 8 billion, 1.3 billion in revenue to net -850m in revenue..

If it wasn't for their balance sheet (pretty strong) and gamble short this crap.. I might still, im gonna wait a few months for the woke communists in the org to drain money then short..

I'm almost 100% certain these people are gonna drain the balance sheet whilst their revenue gonna collapse next year.

Post reply on HN