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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?"
'Nuff said!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
My current boss asked me what I thought of asking all employees to work 10-11 hour days until the company is profitable. ... None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary...
Hahha ha ha ha haaaaaha ahaaa... Chortle... Yes. Well.
Please tell me where you work so I can avoid having anything to do with you folks...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Start your job hunt now.
I'd take a reduction in hours anyday.
They suck and you will get burned out.
You will also write shitty code, which will cost more to maintain.
Market's good, bail asap.
Give him three options:
More pay
Ownership stake
Look for your replacement
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
If you work 10-11 hour days, what do you do on the other 355 days of the year?
rewriting history since 2109
People must be paid. Stock options are a form of payment. But people don't work for free.
Effective? Hardly!
"until the company is profitable" is way too vague to work like that.
Need more useless stuff to read on teh internetz?
Seriously. You hire people to work at a start up, with start up risks, with start up health plans, and expect them to work start up hours without any ownership? To anybody worth hiring, that doesn't even pass the giggle test. Do *you* have stock? if not, why do you work there?
No.
Long answer: Heck no.
I'd say the next time you talk about this should be the day you find a new job. Tell him you quit, and tell him why.
sounds like a great idea.
Seriously... working an occasional long haul is fine, but expecting and scheduling 5x10 is destructive to the lives of the employees and ultimately to the company. He'll get approximately the same output, but with lower company morale and higher employee turnover.
It's very simple. You are paid to think. The quality of your thoughts after 8 hours working in a day is not nearly as good as in the first few hours. Except for a short stint, the quality of thinking after 10 hours is so poor that you will spend more time cleaning up the messes you made when tired than you saved by working longer.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
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.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
My company has been working 12 hour days for 18 months. I don't think they are feasible in a normal economy (people would leave). I don't think they are feasible for too much longer (now having to bring in outside resources for the first time-- people are fully loaded).
However, they are providing us high quality lunch and dinner at our desks. The crew is mostly senior resources (35 to 50 years old) with 12+ years experience). They did this back in 1995-2000 and had a hard time hiring anyone for several years.
The quality is there in my opinion. SO mostly we are just giving up personal lives. I do not watch much TV any more. Every 4 or 5 weeks we get a week or two of 10 hour days as a break. Dinner is not provided those days.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is why fuckedcompany.com should be resurrected. Its services are still in need it appears.
To poster: As having been an employee in salary-only positions, salary+equity positions, and now a business owner with a small (6) group of employees, let me provide you advice from my 11 years of IT experience: Run as fast as you can. No employer should ever be asking you to work with no equity and without additional compensation for 60+ hours a week.
There's legitimate reasons why employees at a startup would need to put in tons of hours until things get up to speed. The flipside is that the potential for a large payday is significantly greater for the startup employer than for an established firm.
It seems therefore logical that the proper arrangement is to offer the employees a chunk of the profit in exchange for getting the push to release done on-time and with all the features. If your employer doesn't want to pay you like a startup, he has no right to ask for startup-esque sacrifices. Conversely, if the employees are not willing to push hard for release in exchange for such a bonus, they should find employment at a more well-established firm.
What should I say to him when we talk about this again?
Tell him he's as clueless as he is greedy.
Or just refer him to this post, and I'll tell him for you.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Masochist-Texas
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:
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
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.
Six months ago I began working solo on a commercial programming project. I've been working 16-18 hours each day, most days, because that's what I feel is required to bring the project to market in a reasonable time. It would be great if I had a team of people and we could all work 8-hour-days, but I don't, so long hours are required.
It sounds like your boss is in a similar situation. He wants to market a product of X size, requiring Y amount of work, in Z time. What he's asking you is: Are you, and the rest of the staff, the right people for this project? Are you willing to do Y amount of work in Z time?
The tone of your question to slashdot is, I think: How do I tell my boss that this is an unreasonable request, while still keeping my job? In other words: How do I dictate the terms of my employment?
Really the question should be to yourself, and it should be exactly the same question that your boss is asking you: Are you the right person for this job?
It's perfectly acceptable for you to decide that you aren't the right person. Maybe all of the other staff are the wrong people too. But the job is what it is. I don't bat an eyelid to working a 12-hour day, but maybe that isn't right for you, and that's fine.
Good luck, anyway. I hope the situation can be resolved in a way that works for everyone.
(Note: my answer would be very different if your boss was asking you to do more work for the same money, but as you didn't say anything about that I assume that isn't the case.)
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.
Sure. The problem is that multiple proven, highly effective ways of losing customers are so closely related to quick and cheesy ways of adding new features. I'll name a few:
* Adding bugs.
* Adding complexity.
* Overloading support.
* Slowing maintenance.
* Making just about everything more expensive, including features customers will decide they need in the future.
I could go on and on, but this is enough to show that going on a new feature spree isn't a no-brainer.
Now from a marketing perspective, who does this better than anyone else? Apple. For many years Apple earned the sneers of tech heads everywhere by keeping its products on a strict feature budget. They *never* introduce a product that does everything you could easily imagine it doing. Instead they:
(a) do a really nice job on the features they deliver and
(b) regularly release a *small* number of new features, small enough they can really hit the marketing ball out of the park when they explain to customers why they absolutely *have* to chuck their old iPod and buy a new one.
The second point is really the key. Apple doesn't get ahead of themselves, they never do it all in one go. Sometimes the new features are really quite impressive, other times they're things Apple could easily have done earlier, but they've timed to nudge the herd down the upgrade track.
The first gen Touch didn't have a built in speaker. That's not a deal breaker, because the first gen was so cool. Then Apple introduced the second gen, which really was only a tiny bit spiffier, but it *did* have a speaker. Then every time a happy 1st gen owner could have used that feature, he'd be thinking, "Gee I love my 1st gen, but I'd be just a *little* bit happier if I bought a 2nd gen." This leaves *everyone* happy. The owner now has his spiffy new iPod with speaker, and Apple has sold two nearly identical devices to a customer for much less than twice the cost.
The only people who are unhappy are cranks who insist on believing Apple does features this way because it's too stupid to come up with new features or see their value to the customer. It's *because* they see the value of new features that they dole them out this way, so they get the greatest possible mileage out of them.
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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.
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
How many people can really work 10-11 hours a day solidly, every day, and produce high quality code?
If you really want to raise productivity, how about:
* get rid of all unnecessary meetings (those that do not directly move the project forward)
* get rid of all unnecessary paperwork (including bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets)
* hire dedicated sales support rather than distracting core engineers
* give engineers a door to close and respect it
* encourage working off-site and/or out-of-hours when deep concentration is required
* encourage engineers to work at time of peak efficiency (don't make a night person work early, etc.)
* establish a culture of no working on weekends
Good engineering management like this can raise productivity 50-100%.
Did he also read the stuff Spolsky said about paying fantastic above-industry-standard salaries and having a fantastic office with excellent workspace and expensive, comfortable chairs, and catered staff lunches daily? Oh, and a lounge with a theater system and a ridiculously expensive coffee machine that costs more than the GDP of some countries?
How about the stuff Spolsky says about retaining old customers by squashing bugs and not just adding new features specifically so you can run around claiming you have a new shiny, even though it's useless and buggy?
Tell your boss to stop cherrypicking from what Spolsky says when he has no idea what his actual management philosophy is.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
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."
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.
Tisha Hayes
Better yet, offer him four twenty dollar notes and ask him if he will give you a hundred dollar note for them. If he says yes, tell him you won't work for someone that doesn't understand money - and leave. If he says no, ask him why he expects you to make the equivalent deal for him - and leave.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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.
I used to work as a Field Service Computer Technician for a Large Corporation. We had Mandatory unpaid overtime and a 60-80 hour week was the norm. I was 23 when I started that job and when I left at 27 I was a dead man. High Blood Pressure, Borderline Diabetes, High Cholesterol. My Doctor had me on a stack of drugs just to keep me going and warned me if I kept this up I'd be dead in 5-10 years. I worked and worked and one day my boss pulled me aside and said "you can't take that vacation! You are too important to your Territory. I was shocked. He told me I'd lose my job if I took the Vacation. Long Story short I took my vacation. I posted my Resume and I got out of there. I work for a new company where we work 35 hour weeks. get paid lots more money and I sit at a Desk most of the day. Here's the best part. Of all the medication I was on about 7 prescriptions I now only take 1. With all the Free time I was able to get Married and have a good life. I now know about the Dangers involved in pulling 60-80 hour weeks. Don't be stupid. No jobs worth the bull shit.
But unless there's a reward for those developers at the end of that tunnel, they should expect people to start jumping ship when the job market improves. Furthermore, developers who are being pressured to put in overtime to implement new features are not going to create the cleanest (or best documented) code; so when those developers leave, the company is going to have a maintenance mess on their hands.
I answer this as I answer anyone asking for this kind of work conditions.
If you want charity, go to a charity organization. Don't work for free, end of story.
I have something to sell (my time) employer need something (my time) and he or her should pay for it.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's not the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but it's pretty bad. Beyond somewhere between 4-6 hours of productive mental work per day, the brain gets tired and your attention and focus goes to hell. Most of us fill out the rest of the day with non-demanding stuff like reading e-mail, gossiping with our coworkers, surfing the Internet, doing paperwork, etc. Push people to work 10+ hours a day and I predict that (a) your best people will suddenly find a job somewhere else, and (b) those remaining will actually slow the project down because of extra bugs and other lost productivity due to mistakes. Or (c), you will ship a bug-riddled, barely-working mess more or less on schedule, like a certain game company is notorious for doing. And lets not forget (d) disgruntled, overworked programmer sells your IP to his new employer or creatively re-arranges your development servers.
Personally, I wish we'd move to either 6-hour work days or a 4 day work-week. I'd rather have the extra day off than fake working for about 10 hours of the week (that 2 hours of the day where I can't concentrate on productive work any more and do mindless crap).
---dragoness