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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?"
Seriously... I work in the game industry and on one project I worked over 100 hours a week for four months straight.
Simple as that. That's of course assuming you could get the people to agree to it in the first place.
You can do long hours for a short period in order to get a particular feature out the door (but will have to give everyone plenty of time to recover afterward). Doing long hours on an open-ended schedule is just a burn-out disaster in the making. Of course, if all the developers quit, the company expenditure is reduced...
Unless your employees are completely and entirely dependent upon this job right now (i.e. not enough skills to get hired somewhere else, supporting families, etc.) or they are completely invested, idealistically, to the products you provide, I imagine a lot of them will leave. Folks don't tend to like being told, from on high, that they absolutely have to do something burdensome. So unless they zealously believe in your product, they'll find somewhere nicer to leave.
I would suggest digging up some research on how, in a given day, most employees only actually produce ~X many hours of quality work (I think I heard something like 4 - 6 hours at one point). Or, alternatively, your boss could address the employee body directly and, rather than demand that employees work those hours, ask for volunteers who would like to see the project succeed to volunteer. Folks prefer long work hours when they are there by choice.
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When I worked for the federal government we had the option to work four 10 hours days and then got to take Friday off. It was pretty sweet especially if you could go down to your car and take a brief power nap during lunch.
Yeah... that project wrecked me. I had to port several hundred thousand lines of assembler all by myself for "NBA Jam" on the Jaguar. Mind you, about 75% of that was data tables which is pretty easy to port but it was still over 100,000 lines of real code as well plus implementing all the architectural changes for a new platform. I had some health issues with my liver almost failing from work stress that plagued me for about a year afterwards (i.e. yellowish eyes / jaundice) but eventually I recovered and I am fine today many years later.
Haha, I believe you just proved my point perfectly. Bosses take note!
I don't know if you want the bosses to take note on that example. In that particular case, I made the company a ton of money (at least compared to what I was getting paid) and successfully finished a game under the incredible strain of near literal death march. All it showed the company was that nearly working your employees to death can be quite profitable.
Depending on what state you are in, there may be meaningful differences between salaried and salaried exempt. Differences that matter a lot, if someone complains about unpaid overtime. In California, for instance, if one assumes that programmers are computer professionals (and the courts haven't, by and large), they can be salaried exempt, but only if they make over $40/hour, or about $80k/year. Less than that, or if they're not computer professionals, they can be salaried, but not salaried exempt, which means they still get overtime.
A lawsuit like that can put even a successful company out of business very quickly.
Umm... no. I was younger, naive, and very hungry to work on games. I worked my ass off for a virtual song. As I said, from the programmer stand-point, this is a very poor case to present to your bosses as an example.
If I understand your post correctly, it sounds like you are working for a startup where people consistently work 9 or 8 hour days (or less). As someone who has worked as a developer for 15 years (in both startups and large companies) and who has also started my own successful company and grown it to a market leader, let me share my opinion on how startups work. Remember that the vast majority of startups fail. To make a startup successful, you need either:
(a) An incredible amount of pure dumb luck and good timing (very rare)
(b) A little bit of luck PLUS an incredible amount of hard work and dedication
If you go to the owner of your startup and say "We will work harder if you pay us more", that indicates that you don't have the intrinsic drive needed to make a startup successful. If on the other hand you go to the owner and say: "Listen, we are going to work as hard as humanly possible to make this successful. We'll work all nighters, 18 hour days, whatever -- we will do what it takes on a consistent basis, making sure that we don't get so burned out that we're making bad decisions or doing poor quality work. In return, we expect to have ownership in this company [aka stock options or even better, a straight grant of common stock if you can negotiate it], to be compensated well, and to have a productive work environment. We don't need rules on minimum hours per day -- in fact if you need these rules to make people work harder, we probably have the wrong people on the team."
If you're not willing to get on board with that, you don't have what it takes to make a startup successful and you should seek work elsewhere. If the owner of the company is not willing to get on board with that, then HE (or she) does not have what it takes to make a startup successful and you should seek work elsewhere.
Cheers
Your coders will start to get repetitive stress injuries.
I kid you not. a local bay area company was upfront and open with me that they require all employees (software and hardware) to work mandatory saturdays (their phrase) for at least the next year, maybe 18mos.
nope, not a sprint but really a long distance run.
I simply told them this was burn-out city and unreasonable. I had an offer but had to say no to them. (I won't mention their name but in the last year, they did make slashdot as a story on their own tech, fwiw).
speaking with one employee, during the interview, gave me the strong impression that they hated this policy and it was wearning them all down.
I had to say no. I'm too old for this shit.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It really depends on the individual programmer.
This is always a worthwhile note.
I headed up a small group 4 developers. The boss, at one point, came over and noted we'd all been working our asses off and wanted to offer up a token of appreciation. I said, "I don't know. Let's find out what people would like." He didn't like the idea--he was concerned that there would be some infighting if somebody got something that was "worth more" than what someone else got. I told him, "These are all individuals who've put their individual lives on hold to get this done. They're going to want different things."
2 guys took cash. 1 guy got a very fancy new computer. And 1 guy said, "Give me an extra two weeks of vacation and let me take a month off."
My advice, in this case, would be to sit down with the people in question and see what they would like in return for 50 hour weeks and how they would like to try to do this. Would they rather do 10 hour days 5 days a week? Would they rather do 8 hour days 6 days a week? Would they like to see more in their paycheck? Would they prefer a bonus for milestones? Shares in the company? Dinners? Try to get some ideas of what people would want and take those back to the boss. Negotiate for your people and see what can be arranged.
I have worked for two companies that went down the same road. One started issuing all sorts of stock options, then they did a reverse 700:1 split and the new shares ended up going for about $3 each (originally they were as high as $38 a share before the split. At one time, during the.com boom it would have been around $2.24 million dollars in stock. After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257. They did re-issue new stock options at the revalued price, it was just an insult.
For seven years I worked the 50-60 hour weeks. Ended up with ulcers, heart problems, insomnia and some stress related disorders and on a laundry list of meds (I still take 12 prescriptions a day, eight years after I was finally laid off).
Seeing the doctor at the time I was taken aback when she said "just quit, no job is worth your life". It all made sense at the time, put in a few more years, exercise my options on a few million dollars and retire by age 40.
The second company just wanted more billable hours (consultant) as they could bill on the hours you put against a project. They just one day, unilaterally decided that our billable targets were set to 50 hours/week. Even working a 60 hour week you still lose hours when doing emails, phone calls, company motivational presentations and the obligatory after hour "social" get-togethers.
I tell ya, unless it is time with someone you really are in love with, after 50 hours a week the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the folks you work with.
Usually the folks who make these sorts of proclamations on "50 hour work weeks" have already been through a few divorces (because their job was way more of a priority than their families) and would not know what to do with their time if they were not at work. At this last company I was working a really long day, it was around 8 pm when I swung by the owners office to say good night to find him sitting there drinking Jack Daniels from a paper cup in his office. That is the type of life they wanted us to live. Only one priority in the world, work your ass off to make money for them. Not giving a damn about what your decisions mean to other people (probably why his wife dumped his ass too) and making all sorts of money so at your death you can have a viking funeral, burning on piles of $1 bills.
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The ford motor company set a 48 hour, 6 day work week because, as Henry Ford said himself, for social justice reasons but it was really to reduce an extremely high turnover rate. This wasn't the whole picture in practice though. http://books.google.com/books?id=4K82efXzn10C&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false He didn't invent the assembly line either. Ford Motors wasn't even the first to use it for auto manufacturing. Ford is not a hero. He was a CEO.
I've worked for a bunch of startups, though no Google or such that I no longer need to work. There are all kinds of people out there, and you need to be very careful not to get screwed. It's amazing still to me how rational likable people can turn into true horrors when money is involved.
So, here's what I recommend based on the very small amount of data presented. First, tell your employees that you have been asked to ask if they will work 10-11 hours per day until profitable without any stock or additional compensation. Be sure to mention the words stock and additional compensation. They will naturally, unless they are seriously whipped employees, say they would like to have either stock or more cash, but they're probably happy to work their hearts out if treated fairly. If you and your employees believe the company has a decent chance at a good future, go back to your boss and tell him the employees want stock, and that you feel it might be a good idea, and that you think you could run the team hard for a while if they all thought it was in their best interest. Also mention that if they own stock, they'll all want to work harder, even after they are profitable.
Unless your boss is a complete dick (which is actually quite common), he'll find a way to get your guys stock. Be sure to ask how many outstanding shares there are, and be prepared for the possibility that he lies about the answer. Don't be a sucker. Try to double check the number by mentioning it to another investor, board member, the CFO, or someone else who knows the truth, and judge their reaction. Do a quick estimate of the current value of the company, and figure out how many shares per hour you could by with the cash that those hours are worth. Maybe be nice and work for a discount, but don't get totally screwed.
Unfortunately, I see way too much of two kinds of people in startups. There are way too many dishonest owners and bosses who will take advantage of trusting geeks. After all, our skills are all engineering and software, not negotiation and conflict. On the other hand, there are way too many gullible geeks, and geeks who like so many beaten house wives are simply unable to grow a pair and stand up for themselves. Assuming you care about your employees, it's probably up to you to stand up for them.
Then, there's the standard compromise, which I hope you will avoid. It is very common in these situations for your boss to offer you personally a fair stock deal, so long as you can sell a crap deal to your employees. The standard way this is done is for you to be asked to claim each share is worth X, when in reality it's worth less than X/10. The way to help your employees in this case is to somehow leak how much stock is outstanding. If your employees are too dumb to guess what the stock is actually worth once they have this information, they may not deserve extra compensation. The fact that you're posting here may mean you actually care about your employees. I hope you do, and can stick up for them.
Finally, if your boss is one of those fairly common jerks who will absolutely refuse to get you stock now, but goes on and on about how much money he's going to pay you once their profitable, then consider moving to a new company. I have never in all my years in industry seen any such promise fulfilled.
I'll end with a story where I got screwed for not growing a pair. Back in 1999, I was doing some consulting for Zvi OrBach, founder of eASIC. He'd promised me 2% of his stock for access to all my source code, and he promised to keep the code confidential, etc. I delivered the code, and the next day he sent it to Romania, where of course nothing is confidential. I asked for stock certificates, and he gave all sorts of BS reasons he couldn't do it right away, but if I'd wait a reasonable period of time, he'd make it happen. He sent me to Romania to train the team to use my software, and you know what he asked me to do? He asked me to tell them to work extra hours without pay, and he told me
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I like how the OP mentions Joel Spolsky when he's written several articles talking about just this situation and how it never works.
It must be nice to be a manager, picking and choosing the kinds of information you choose to retain.
That would meanhe would have to respect research. Hell,the fucking article doesn't say that more features sell software. In fact, it says quite the opposite. It says solve a problem better than anyone else, without worrying about your competitors.It has good advice. But read it and discuss it with your boss. Especially the many paragraphs about the importance of spoiling your programmers. HEll, Sposky talks about why overtime is bad in Joel On Software.
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For those of us who don't know a lot about how to value stock, would you (or anyone) be willing in detail to explain this? I think I am not the only one who would like to learn how not to get screwed. Moreover, if the total stock count is secret, how are we to know it? (And how can we verify that we're not being lied to about how many shares there are?)
Put the company's stock ticker symbol in to Google and search. The amount returned is the value of the stock.
If the stock is not publicly traded and no value is returned, then that stock is worth nothing.
Yes, that stock may be worth something some day, but the company might as well be handing out lottery tickets.
The stock granted to non-executive employees in these situations gives you a spot at the very end of the line of people waiting to get money out of the company.
Investors are in front of you. Any new investors putting money in cut in front of you. Vendors and creditors are in front of you. Executives holding preferred shares are in front of you.
Most successful start-ups either remain private or are bought out by a larger competitor. Very very few go public. And that is pretty much the only way your stock will be worth anything.
If given the choice, take the lottery tickets.
This situation is not unusual. But what bosses forget is to enable their employees to WORK more hours rather then just ordering them to do so.
We single geeks waste a lot of time. Do you make breakfast? You COULD be working already having skipped the rush hour making your commute faster IF your boss served breakfast at the office.
Same with doing the shopping. Hire a teen to do it for your employees and they don't need to rush to the shops at the last minute.
Expensive? Not at all, sure it costs a bit of money but the hours saved not just in time but in frustration your employees will vent during the day is huge. THINK of it. How many hours a day are wasted with people complaining about their commute? Enable them to escape it, by leaving earlier/later, and the complaint time is gone and you get a happier employee.
Same with other trivial stuff. Arrange for someone who can do the waiting in line bits. You know, like a secretary. Who does call the energy company to handle the bosses complaint about his personal bill because that time could be better spend on more productive work.
Want more out of your workers? Reduce their non-work load. A person has 100% energy, anything not spend on work is a waste. How many of you have taken a few hours off to take the car to the garage? Have the office flunky do it and gain some productive hours.
Same with the office itself. If a programmer has to load paper into the printer he ain't coding, not thinking about how to solve a valuable problem. So have people to do that.
It really ain't complicated. Get your development team a secretary. Watch productivity soar.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I worked for a company once that had a strict rule of 7.5 hours per day 5 days a week. If you needed to work extra to finish something you had to get clearance from the director of development.
Their reasoning was that after 7.5 hours per day you introduce much more errors and that will increase testing and bug fixing time and ultimately the company product.
With that reasoning in mind..... 10-11 hour days will likely f-ck up any programs developed pretty badly :-)
As I've just thrown out a bit of a nasty story about Zvi above, I'd like to explain a bit more here. First, Zvi considers himself a man of high ethical standards. I'm no moral relativist, but Zvi is from the Middle East, where I suspect lying to the patent office and Romanian employees is considered wise, rather than unethical. At AMI, I dealt mostly with very ethical Christians and Mormons, and I figured it'd be hard to be screwed by the likes of these people. However, I discovered that a company with weak leadership is capable of acting like the worst individual that could be made from the worst aspects of all of it's leaders. One John Stone provided much of those worst aspects, but others provided irrational fear, NIH, kingdom building, genuine stupidity, etc. The individual made from these traits is not someone you can actually deal with.
I loved the trip to Romania Zvi sent me on in 1999. I often wish I could go back there for a while. I'm sure Romanians on this list could properly describe Romania, but I'd like to say how it was for an American geek. First, I was not allowed to carry any significant amount of cash, and there was no such thing as credit cards. Instead, I had a person assigned to make sure I was well taken care of all the time. This is probably a very good thing. The first day, my guide and friend stepped between me and a poor child on the street who was reading a newspaper while walking past me. My guide explained that it was likely that the kid had a knife behind it to cut the laptop shoulder strap while another kid stole it. The poverty on the streets in Bucharest was quite sad, but the city was in many ways like all international cities, vibrant with activities, great food, and culture. We drove to a city which I believe is Iasi, though Zvi called it Yas or something similar, so I remained confused as to where I actually was.
Iai for me was a place of great contradictions. The beauty of some architecture was breathtaking, old and magnificent, while much of where people actually lived was dull and uninspired, built under communist rule. I stayed at a hotel considered very nice for the area, and have no complaints. The bed was very small, more like a cot, but it was fine. One night a very beautiful tall slender girl knocked at my door, and opened her over-coat, revealing barely legal clothing underneath. She said "Speak, and I there", and pointed to the floor. Now, I am a huge geek, and I was married, but you'd think I'd figure out what she meant. I thought she was saying she had lost her dress under the couch, but there was nothing there. It took about five minute for her to get me to understand what she was suggesting, and then I was quite embarrased and turned her down as nicely as I could, which frankly was hard for me to do. I think fear was what kept me honest to my wife that night, fear of catching some disease, fear that my room was being taped and I'd be black-mailed, fear that she would somehow wind up taking my laptop (the only valuable thing I had).
The software team was a group of around 10 employees, mostly in their 20's, who had degrees from the University. They worked in one room, on stools, with the worst PC hardware available on the market. Zvi had a Jewish buddy living here, who was running the whole thing, and one thing Zvi may not have realised is that he paid for Dell computers or equivalent, but the team got much cheaper hardware. His buddy pocketed the difference. A major problem was that the network barely worked at all, because the wiring was sub-standard. Their eithernet cables were super thin, and many just didn't work. I'd never seen eithernet cables like that, but someone was making money by skimping a penney per foot, and the software team was hard pressed to collaborate at all. It was litterally a sweat shop, where the heat from the machines and our bodies made the room quite uncomfortable.
But, the team love to write code, some of them were pretty good, and the others seemed to learn quickly. There was an ex
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell