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Are 12-16 Hour Workdays Productive?
theodp writes " It's important to me,' former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz recalls saying as he threatened a manager for termination because one of his subordinates failed to conduct 1:1 meetings, 'that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It's why I come to work.' Ben seems to be cut from the same management cloth as new Yahoo CEO Marissa 'I-Don't-Really-Believe-In-Burnout' Mayer, who boasted how she solved the work-life balance problems of mother-of-three 'Katie,' who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls with her Google Finance team in Bangalore, by no longer making Katie also stay for late meetings on her Google day shift on those occasions where it'd make her miss her kids' soccer games and recitals." Jason Fried, C.E.O. of 37signals, wrote a piece for The New York Times recently singing the praises of working a 4-day week part of the year.
I work 90 minutes a day. That feels about right to me.
My feeling is that if you need to work long hours, your job is badly designed. Studies have suggested that once over 44 hours a week, productivity starts to decline faster than the gains from longer working hours. I believe this; I've spent so long debugging code from people who thought pulling all-nighters was smart that in at least one case we might just as well not have employed him.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Eight years ago I worked with my team of 12 for 110 days at 16 hours per day. We had to because the project was late (due to client's management and internal politics) and because we were paid by the hour.
Financially it was worth it, the pay was very good and let's just say it changed my life. In terms of accomplishing anything however, I think the money was not well spent. Everyone was so tired after 8-10 hours that they just faked it. Productivity was very low, the resulting code was crap, morale was abysmal even with the financial incentives. Luckily most of the team members were single (only 3 of us were married). After 100 days, no one could actually do any real work that required thought, we had to wind down for a month.
Like I said, I think it was a good experience (both financially and in learning one's limits) but I would not do it again. I don't think an artist or programmer can be productive more that 6-8 hours/day, everything else is browsing, chatting, faking it or simply doing bad work.
Anything past occasional shit-happens-needs-to-be-fixed-now overtime is bad management. When young people are involved, it's relatively easy to push them into pulling insane hours, because they may be single and want to prove themselves and don't know their limits and don't know any better, but it's not productive.
Norway: 34 hour work week
Denmark: 37,5 hour work week (includes paid break)
Sweden 38 hour work week (excluding unpaid breaks)
And Norway and Sweden are amongst the richest, most successful places in the world. We have a minimum of 4 weeks vacation each year, we perform better because were well rested and healthy.
keyword: occasional. I generally work 7 hours (10am-6pm, +lunch), no more. That's the "usual day". However, there were perhaps 3 days this year that I left work well after midnight to get stuff out by morning. And I've done that without being ``asked''.
Now if I was asked to do that everyday, I'd find another place to work.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
it depends on what you are doing
As an "older" slashdotter I've studied this in myself and coworkers and when I was in retail management I studied this in my employees and was astounded to discover its a concentration thing. Any time you have to concentrate, be it software development, operations support, video games, or manual labor, a minute of concentration seems to be a minute of concentration regardless of why you're concentrating..
You'd be surprised how much concentration it takes to do a manual labor job. There do exist absolutely mindless shoveling jobs where there is no QA and there is no goal and it's a perfectly safe non-distracting environment, but they are VERY few and far between.
I've done call center and cashier in the past and they require too much concentration to do for more than a couple hours both in myself and employees I've supervised. Oh you can make them stand there, you can make them go thru the motions, but one way or another you're only getting 3 to 6 hours of productive concentration out of them before they start screwing up, or getting goofy, or simply not working but being present.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's called mutually beneficial relationships. Normally I work four ten's a week. My boss is very good about not regularly pushing me to do overtime. Once in a while, crunch time hits, and there is no one to step up and get the extra work load done. When that happens, I don't mind pitching in and pulling some crazy hours. As long as I get paid for them, and as long as it doesn't become a regular event, it is fine. It makes me look like a great employee, it makes my boss look good to the customer, and most importantly: it is beneficial to my boss to make sure that it DOESN'T become a regular event, as I would cease to make myself available when real emergencies happen.
Great for businesses to squeeze the lemon to the last drop from every employee and to have everyone always-on; not so great for the employees. Why bother even having a family or a home if all time is spent at work, thinking about work, or dreaming about work. And yes, I have "been there, done that".
An article in The Guardian listed the top five regrets of dying people:
Lots of people probably feel trapped in the current workplace due to debt, running expenses, or an expensive-to-maintain self-image, which requires maintaining the current position or even advancing the career. My advice is to think outside the bubble, e.g. move to a cheaper location or cut back on luxuries. If not possible today, actively pursue opportunities to make future changes.
I worked with a programmer that drove 150+ miles a day round trip because the company agreed to waive the dress policy for him when none closer to where he lives would. He was a musclebound hippie with a pony tail down to the small of his back. His daily attire consisted of a muscle shirt and neon orange Hammer pants. Programmers can be an unyielding bunch when it comes to their comfort zones. Given the demands placed on them it is usually warranted.
He also made some really kick ass habanero jerky once a month.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Partly, yes.
I'm a programmer (mostly... but also software designer, code maintainer... and sysadmin and support etc. Small company, must be flexable). When I'm working on new algorithms or squashing bugs that 'go deep into the system' affecting multiple different parts of the code, I'm sometimes at work staring at a problem I can't seem to solve (sometimes for a whole day) or I have the feeling I solved it badly (for example when my solution introduces a lot of extra overhead). Then I go home, make dinner, have some off-time hours, go to sleep and wake up. In that time period, I am unconsciously processing the problems in alternative ways and more often than not new angles pop into my head making the problem lots easier or make it solvable in a way that is more consistent of has less drawbacks than my previous work. Then the next day of work I can use those ideas for new code and solve the problem (in a better way).
Call it a cushy job if you want, but sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sleep it over a night and then begin with fresh insight.
Ow, I work a 4 day week (and get paid proportionately less of course) but I find it fit my life-style and keep me productive those hours I am available. (By the way, typing this in my lunch-break.)
That conversation goes like this:
Employee: "I'd like to talk to you about this overtime we're all doing. A lot of us have to neglect our other obligations to do it, and we'd like to find a way of having a better work/life balance."
Boss: "You'll work the hours I tell you to, and you'll like it. Shut up and get back to work or you're fired."
Even if an agreement is reached during compensation negotiations on hiring the employee, there are no consequences for saying "I don't care what you were told. You're a salaried employee, we're not obligated to pay overtime. Now, get back to work, you lazy shit."
Yes, that's probably the time to get a new job. But, with the economy being in the toilet, jobs are pretty hard to come by, even for talented programmers. Since you don't want to go bankrupt (or lose your or your family's health insurance), you do what you're told.
I am fortunate in the fact that I do not have one of those bosses. My manager does not care when I come in or when I leave, as long as I take paid time off accurately when I hand in my time card. When we came under a ridiculous deadline recently from a Big Important Potential Client, I was given a budget and told to find a freelance developer to help out. When I had to get up at 0300 recently to fix an upgrade to Apache that had gone wrong, he gave me a gift card as compensation. But, I work for a not-for-profit company, and thus don't have investors or stockholders demanding that I be worked to death to make them money.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The time difference is always the vendor's problem - never the customer's.
We've dumped European vendors because they were unable to provide service and support during August. Believe it or not, your holiday time really screws you economically.
There was one manager I had ... who scheduled meetings around 8AM that frequently lasted to 1PM or later. And it was weekly, every Friday.
The more annoying part was those he felt did "important work" got the ability to drop in and out - the QA lead, the productoin guy, etc. He either got to them first and they were out in half an hour or they got pulled in as-needed for 10 minutes.
The rest of us had to sit around beyond lunch.
Of course, after the meeting everyone departed for lunch and by the time you got back, it was only a couple of hours before quitting anyhow, so effectively, it was a wasted day. We learned to add 25% to our work estimates to counter the loss of an entire day.
We've been doing this for the last 24 months.
Two people under 55 have died this year.
Heart attack and a cancers.
Last friday, they wheeled out a guy in his 40's found unconcious at his desk with a heart attack. Don't know if he will make it or not.
Just realize the ultimate cost of no rest and constant stress.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I agree. I first realized that reading about Seymour Cray and elves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray#Personal_life
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. “Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,” writes Robinson; “and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.”
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days. So paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.