Are 10-11 Hour Programming Days Feasible?

drc37 writes "My current boss asked me what I thought of asking all employees to work 10-11 hour days until the company is profitable. He read something from Joel Spolsky that said the best way to get new customers is to add new features. Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?"

Comments

Just Read This

[TexVex]

Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?

Here, this link is all you need to know: http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php. It's a bit of a wall of text, but you can read the first part and then skip to the end, which contains this nugget:

In most times, places, and industries over the past century, managers who worked their employees this way would have been tagged as incompetent -- not just because of the threat they pose to good worker relations, but also because of the risk their mismanagement poses to the company's productivity and assets. A hundred years of industrial research has proven beyond question that exhausted workers create errors that blow schedules, destroy equipment, create cost overruns, erode product quality, and threaten the bottom line.

Re:Bye-bye!

[syousef]

'Nuff said!

The only correct answer as far as I'm concerned. OP is an idiot for even posting the question. Correct response: Start handing around your resume, talking to head hunters and agencies, and old colleagues. Get out ASAP.

Boss is not going to pay more (or he'd be thinking of hiring more people, plus the company's not profitable). Boss is not smart enough to understand that what he's asking will result in lower quality and won't turn around profitability. Boss probably doesn't care about the welfare of the employee.

Sounds like OP is in a sinking ship.

No

[Spatial]

No.

You can only manage that kind of effort temporarily. Soon your work goes into the shitter, despite feeling that you're getting more done. And you need an equivalently long recovery period just to get back on track afterward.

Being asked to do it for an indeterminate amount of time isn't a good sign.

Re:Bye-bye!

[Monkeedude1212]

For me, It'd be a simple equation.

Lets suppose I'm a junior making 50k a year.

That works out to be ~$24.65 dollars an hour, at the regular schedule of 8 hour work days 5 days a week (40 hours a week).

They want to bump up the yearly hours from 2028 to 2600 or 2860?
That's 572 to 832 overtime hours in my book. Overtime usually means at least a time and a half (1.5x) but if you are feeling like this will be particularily draining you could ask for more.

So $24.65 x 1.5 ~= $36.98 per hour
coming to a total of an extra $21149.7 or $30763.2 a year.

So, if I were making 50K, I'd ask for 72k to 80k a year for them to ask for an extra 2 hours of work a day. And thats being pretty generous.

If you make more than that, and you think overtime should be 2x the pay, be prepared to step up and show them the math. At first they'll think you are joking but when you lay it out in terms that are normally accepted by the working society, they won't have much to argue with. If they want to fire you because you won't work the extra hours for less, you can file for wrongful dismissal. Unless of course you signed a contract at the beginning of your job lending yourself to be run over.

Re:Bye-bye!

[jrumney]

This is certainly true if you measure productivity in value of output per unit of time worked. OTOH, if you have exempt employees, your labor costs don't scale with hours worked, and you may, within a certain range, get more output per unit of labor cost by expanding hours past the point where that would be beneficial in a system of hourly wages.

Indeed. Studies have shown that the peak point for knowledge workers is something like 7.5 hours a day, 4 days a week, so going up from the standard 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (which we have Henry Ford to thank for - he carefully researched the optimum working time for assembly line workers) is already giving you diminishing returns.

Re:Bye-bye!

[Surt]

The third hand is traditionally referred to as 'the gripping hand' in nerd circles.

Re:See!

[jalefkowit]

No, the guy who wrote it (Phil Kaplan, aka "Pud") shut it down after the bubble burst. Ironically, today he's a VC and the founder of a company, Blippy, whose business model ("every time you buy something with your credit card, we post the details of your purchase online for all your friends to see!") sounds almost as silly as the companies he used to make fun of.

If you want a '90s nostalgia fix, he did write a FuckedCompany book after winding the site down.

Re:Bye-bye!

[Jane Q. Public]

That's a nice story, but the fact remains that working programmers 10 hours a day for more than a couple of weeks max (for a particularly nasty deadline, for example) is just plain counterproductive. There are many years of stastistics to back that up. I don't have them right at hand, but I am sure someone here does.

The statement that a happy and relaxed development team is more productive is still true.

Re:Bye-bye!

[TapeCutter]

The 40hr week was fought for and won by the union movement, it had absolutely nothing to do with Henry Ford.

Re:I did the 80 hour work week

[Kjella]

You assume you have weekends off... at 80 hours, you have at least a six day work week.