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!

[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: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.