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They Work Long Hours, But What About Results?
theodp writes "HBS lecturer Robert C. Pozen says it's high time for management to stop emphasizing hours over results. By viewing those employees who come in over the weekend or stay late in the evening as more 'committed' and 'dedicated' to their work, as a UC Davis study showed, managers create a perverse incentive to not be efficient and get work done during normal business hours. 'It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace,' writes Pozen. 'Focusing on results rather than hours will help you accomplish more at work and leave more time for the rest of your life.'"
I just go home for the day.
If I do have stuff to do, I'll work until night time if I'm feeling good about it.
Judging employees by results is great, if you have a good way to measure results.
This is notoriously difficult in creative, team efforts such a software development.
You mean if you set clear goals and not force people to sit at their desks and pretend to work they'll be more productive? Tell me more. And tell my boss.
While the author of the article seems to lean into this approach with the target of maybe working less hours, a results-based way of working can also have disadvantages: working more hours than the stipulated (to try to achieve visible results, or just better-looking results), burnout because of the latter, etc.
Coding is just what it is: knowledge discoverability. Sometimes you discover it very quickly, sometimes you don't find it. The only good management technique I know is: hire the best people, and then trust them. Don't measure neither hours nor results.
Measure performance based on lines of code put online. That should help efficiency.
I know someone who some years ago started work in a Scandinavian company. He then started staying back late (everyone else left mostly on time).
;).
After a few days the boss came to him and asked him:
1) Is there a problem with the project? Are there enough people and resources allocated for it?
2) Does he need extra training to do his job?
3) Is the job a good fit for him?
So he stopped staying late just for the sake of staying late
A colleague of mine used to work for a company where he would be criticized for not staying late with the others when deadlines were looming, even though he had already finished his part long before.
With the constant meetings, phone calls and emails, how do you ever get some serious code written?
Many of our group work either very early or very late, and often a bit on the weekend.
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I measure "the rest of my life" in special "vacation time" hours tracked in a database to which i havent any access. I withdraw "vacation hours" to enjoy my life, and in turn the company I work for doesnt fire me for "the rest of my life" on their time.
these hours, due to the nature of my salaried employment, are however competely subjectively interpreted and at any time i can be called to work during them. The hours outside of $start_time and $end_time for my job are also rather nonexistent. In the literal words of my boss, "we can call you anytime we want." So the problem with "work smarter not longer" is the fact that it is entirely antithetical to the structural composition of "salaried employment."
Good people go to bed earlier.
Them Harvard guys don't miss a thing, do they?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The incentives are even worse if you're a lawyer. Inefficiency not only makes you look better for working long hours, but it objectively is better from the perspective of your employer. The more hours you work, the more you can charge the client. You solved a problem in 10 minutes because you're smart, know how to research and/or have worked on something like this before? Well shit... we were hoping it'd take 10 hours of research at $400/hour. The billable hour is terrible.
I worked for a company that based your annual bonus on the amount of overtime you put in. Not productive, mind you, just hours. At the end of the year, they would tally up the hours you worked, and those with the most hours at their desk got the biggest bonuses.
Being new to this, I asked my boss: "If I do everything right, and my project never needs rework, and my clients are happy, and all my projects are profitable, and I go home on time every day, will I get a bonus?" "No."
"If I screw up, my projects are late and over budget, and I'm working a lot of hours because my clients are pissed at the low quality of work I do, and my projects constantly lose money because I'm an idiot, will I get a bonus?" "Yes."
True to form, my bonus for the year was $50, in spite of being one of the most profitable employees in the organization. I left shortly thereafter.
As usual...this says more about the stupidity of management than anything else. I still wait for the day when western society give up the idea of having todays system of "managers" that don't know shit about what's happening around them. It's an ancient philosophy about how to run business...and it's plain stupid.
by being told to work harder as well.
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The set of employees that has come in to work extra hours is almost surely more "willing to work extra hours when necessary" than the set of employees who have never worked extra hours (including, potentially, because they've never needed to.) On the other hand, the "extra hours" probably also contains a higher percentage of "people who can't budget their time well enough to finish things within the time planned." As a manager I'd certainly count overall productivity as one of my main concerns, but I might value an employee with lower "average" productivity but who is better able to accommodate spikes than the employee whose average productivity is higher but who is unwilling to make any personal sacrifice during extenuating circumstances. And that seems perfectly reasonable.
Where I work it is enough to keep saying you are so incredibly busy :). No counting needed, they dont even keep track :).
That is, most managers will focus on the metrics that are easy to measure (like hours worked, say) as opposed to the metrics that matter (quality, supportability, etc.)
Why not just judge the team itself then, and let the immediate manager for that team decide who is valuable? A team will have goals that fit somewhere into the broader organizational goals; individuals on the team can advance those goals in different ways.
Let's say, as an example, that you have two programmers on a team, Alice and Bob. Alice writes large amounts of code, which has few bugs and which works consistently, and she is an expert in the languages and libraries that are used by the team. Bob is not great at writing code and does not have the language expertise that Alice has, but he is great at solving problems and figuring out what code needs to be written. If Bob is not around, Alice produces less because she is not as good at problem solving; if Alice is not around, Bob tries to write the code and does a terrible job. Can you really say that one of these employees is "better" or "more valuable" than the other? What about Catherine, the person who is a mediocre coder and a mediocre problem solver, but who is great at keeping the team's morale up and who can help motivate people to meet deadlines (but who is not officially in a management position, and who maybe lacks the qualifications when it comes to organizing budgets or making tough hiring or firing decisions)?
Palm trees and 8
I work in an open plan office. While this allows me to see what is happening, and make sure my employees are happy and productive, it means I get no peace.
I have recently started to time the intervals between me actually getting any work done. Last Tuesday I went for 12 minutes without someone coming and asking something.
While I don't mind answering and helping people, it means I get none of my actual own work done. Sometimes I just need an hour to get x done without interruption. Often times this leads to me taking work home with me.
I might make a rule that if I have a traffic cone on my head, you can't disturb me.
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about the long or even short term well being of workers. If you subscribe to this line of thought you're looking at workers as an asset. That plays well with workers that want to believe they're irreplaceable. Fact is, there's so many people in the Global Economy that you can easily find a worker that can do those kind of hours productively. Sure, he/she burns out. But again, Global Economy. Supply and Demand. There's a huge over supply of workers in a Global Economy, and always will be. And you don't have to train. Desperate workers will train on their own time and their own dime. A lot (most) will be crushed but the debt and stress. But as an employer in a modern, high productivity workplace the 10% that survive are more than enough.
I guess my point is, don't count on your boss caring about your productivity dropping as your hours increase. If you trip and fall there's 100 guys waiting to overtake you in the race to the bottom that is supply side economics...
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In Japan white collar workers are expected to stay late, even if they are out of work and are just looking busy. It's the total opposite of the Japanese blue collar factory worker experience. A lot of folks think the faux productivity has kept them from getting out of their financial woes. The article focuses on hourly billable jobs like lawyers but a lot of it apply to poor eastern management styles. In particular the focus on reading and writing memo and BS paperwork. There's a lot of rote BS work that goes on.
On the hand I quite enjoy working as an hourly computer consultant. I think my focus is results and I think things like iterative design really shift the focus from hours to what you got done. That brings a lot of value to the client in the end. But there are a lot of consulting companies out there where the focus is utilization and bill (mostly seen in creative services such as Marketing IT or off-shore consulting).
Because that would require management to do their job instead of trying to justify their 6-figure salaries. Personally, I'd say the reason why labor is exploited for overtime is because of the exempt salary provision in the law. Remove the exempt portion of it so all employees are covered by the overtime rules and such. That way, if managers think you need to be there beyond 8 hours, they'll pay you for it. Right now, if management tells me that I need to "work until the job is done", they are free to do so without providing anything extra for it.
Without me letting them have the hours most of my employees would not be able to survive and I would not have a good employee.
When big jobs come in I can count on them to get it done some weekend pay be damned If I could double their pay and let them stay home more I would but me and you know that is not going to happen.
Sssh dont tell no one.
That's why I got canned. I didn't work weekends unless it was mandatory. Why should I expect to spend about 60-75% of my weekends per year working overtime because my boss refuses to hire enough employees so he'll look good at "cost cutting"? That number is accurate for 2 years that I measured it.
But what did my counterpart do? He sat and watched Youtube videos for about 2-3 hours every day, and even more time on weekends. Who cared if you produced output or not if you're working overtime? That's the only metric *shiver* a "leading provider of nuclear power in the US" uses. He got caught once, so he bought earbuds so he could make sure nobody else heard the videos playing over his speakers. Don't get me wrong, they totally make up a system to benchmark you against your peers. But if schedule starts falling behind they won't look at the output numbers. They go straight to the overtime charts to see who has and who hasn't worked them. If you haven't, YOU are clearly the reason they're behind. They never consider the boss to be to blame because he would know better. Next time you get evaluated, guess what they remember most? That YOU held up a project and your potential pay raise and bonus go down the drain.
He screwed up ALOT of things too. Some of them impacted safety. Guess who had to fix them? Not him. And guess who had to spend stupendous amounts of time fixing his mistakes. Not him.
There's a reason why I don't live near that companies power plants anymore.
What's even more interesting is that I've always been a proponent of nuclear power. But I'm really questioning whether companies can be trusted enough to safely operate a nuclear plant. Would YOU trust a company like Microsoft or Apple to properly maintain and operate a nuclear reactor?
In Norway, work hours are 34 hours a week. And yet Norway have some of the highest salaries in the world, some of the least unemployment and they are amongst the happiest people in the world as well.
Why? I'm pretty sure that is because they do reward efficiency rather than how many hours you put in.
In Sweden it's the other way around, here they work 40-45 hours a week, and people sometimes feel miserable over the long working hours.
Of course, this is a problem that relates to the country you live in. Take a poor garbage man in a 3rd world country, he earns perhaps 4 dollars each day and his working hours are from 6 in the morning to 1 in the night, compared to him - we live a life of luxury. What makes us miserable though, is that we KNOW that life COULD be better, and we tend to envy those more fortunate than ourselves.
I'm a very efficient graphics artist, but that doesn't get me more pay, my boss only knows me for this speed, and if I slowed down I'd save on my already worn wrists, but he'd only focus on that then, I'd be out of the job - even if the other graphics artists are much slower.
I've had many jobs, in various countries, but it's always the same everywhere I go, my bosses has always looked into how many hours of work I put in, rather than the amount of work I actually get done.
It's like management like to focus on this as a sort of a "loyalty" test. They often work over hours themselves, especially owners of small businesses tend to work 80 hour weeks, and frown upon the worker that doesn't put in the extra hours, by giving you small hints like, - oh...going home so soon? Done already? Looking at you in a displeased disapproving way.
Many of them also discipline you by ignoring your comments and suggestions if you put less hours in, and appraise your every move if you do put overtime in without charging for it. And if you question that, then you'll get surprised looks of "oh, are you trying to think".... of course, you can't see their thoughts, because they're so focused on their beliefs and goals, that anything else is foreign to them. Deny deny deny!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
As a member of the military, we do heavily take our cues from the Boss (Commander or Chief) When they go home everyone else feels safe enough to head home.
I learned a long time ago that was a pretty stupid thing to do. I've had a lot of bosses that hated their home life or didn't feel like driving accross town during rush hour, or were just burning time to make some regular events so they would stay late for no work related reason.
I get dirty looks when I head out the door on time or early to go to the gym, like I'm skating. The reality is my bosses know I'm a go to guy when things are screwed up, that I've been known to work 16-24 hour straight when they really go south, that I'll come in for however long it takes on the weekends, and can be packed and out the door to Krap-ic-stan on deployment without much fuss...if there is an actual reason to do.
Otherwise I head on home when it's time, take my vacation time without guilt, and ignore the drones' in the office snide comments, who make their own lives missereable while blaming it on work.
So I sit in a chair in front of a laptop for 8 hours writing "documentation" and dealing with change manglement processes, then another 1-3 hours actually getting real work done after the close of business. It'd be cheaper for them to hire a wannabe actor to sit in my seat from 9-5, and then just pay me for my 3 hours a day of actual productivity.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I had the exact discussion with my boss the other day. She was inquiring on how to motivate me to work harder -- meaning, she has seen that when I am focused, I can get loads of non-stop quality work done quicker than anyone else in our team, however there are days when I accomplish little in terms of new functionality etc. This is the flow that we all know, you either can get there or not, it does not always come on whim.
Anyhow, I replied that I am a simple being and I can be motivated easily -- if I coded harder, and more quickly, would there be a monetary bonus if the project was finished early? No. If I coded harder, and more quickly, would it be possible to use less than the allocated hours per week sitting in the office? No. Well, how do you expect to motivate people to code quick and hard on constant basis? Uhh.. *insert generic company talk here*.
Anyhow -- if there are no incentives to work hard, why should I drain myself more? I do not get paid more, there are no bonuses for meeting the deadline, there is no extra time to spend for my own activities if I finish the job quicker. Why should I strain myself more than I have to, when the no-sweat approach brings me far above average in productivity?
If anyone can help me here, I would be keen to know the solution. And so would my boss.
These are probably the same managers who say you are a cost center and provide no value and are all gung hu on metrics. Shouldn't they provide a value and metrics? You know .... do your job and manage them so they do not have to stay late?
Every good manager I had noticed when I am late and got concerned. The thinking is if I am working late I am in trouble and there is a problem I am not telling him or her.
The manager needs to set metrics to make sure people meet them. If they meet them then do not care. However if Sally is behind the same metrics but talks an hour on hte phone with her boyfriend and browses the internet a lot and stays late frequently, then the manager needs to address it. Meet the results and you could blow him in the office for all I care. However, if you can't get your work done I do not care about your hours. Out you go! It also means making sure your employees are not doing dumb shit like chatting about what they are going to do 3 hours a day to other managers or working on silly todo lists. That is your job as the manager to talk to them and take the hits and punches.
Basically you can't be a respectable manager and put metrics on your staff if you are not willing to do it to yourself and make sure things are delivered.
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If employees had more free time, they might think.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
One VP for whom I used to work referred to employees that left right at closing time as "Fred Flintstones." He made sure his derisive attitude towards these employees was well displayed in front of the CEO of the company at the end of the day as the line of cars left the parking lot. Most of the employees who stayed after the 5PM quitting time were there because they started their shifts later than the other employees.
This VP's attitude blinded him to the fact that those be labeled "Fred Flintstones" were on the job first thing in the morning, well before he arrived to sit in his office for the day doing nothing engaged with production of product in the company. Never mind that these very employees were the engineers that developed and made the technology of the company's primary product. Ironically, the one engineer he praised for staying late each day was staying late for a very special reason: it was the only time he could switch out the sabotaged firmware he created into shipping machines and put non-sabotaged firmware into machines that were being returned for "repairs". He was sabotaging the firmware in order to ensure that his job of hunting down bugs in the programming would be too important to get laid off.
This sabotage was discovered when the engineer was out of vacation and forgot to remove his secret code from his computer. The senior engineer on the project needed to double check the programming, logged into the saboteur's computer and discovered the two sets of code. Sadly, it was long too late for the many employees that had to be laid off because the company was struggling due to the problems the device was having. Most of the employees let go were the ones the VP had labeled Fred Flintstones. With the truly productive employees gone, it was pretty much game over for the company. They were able to float a little longer, but the lack of improvement and productivity stopped any possibility of growth in the company. When the sabotage was discovered, the laid off employees were no longer available. Eventually, the company pretty much closed their doors, being bought out by a competitor.
The attitude that the people who left at the end of the day and didn't put in extra hours were substandard employees was dead wrong. They were the people who made things happen in the company. Once let go, no longer were there any doers in the company and everything ground to a halt
Whew! This water sure is cold!
That's why I often go I to work when they're not around to fuck everything up. Luckily, "managers" don't put in a lot of hours, and they work even less, so it's not too bad.
I have a friend who doesn't work for a company that does bonuses like that, but still is a "moar hours = moar better" kind of place. My friend is a nice guy but... not as competent as one might hope. Back when we both worked at the same place another co-worker described him as someone who "Broke down big rocks in to little rocks and then glued the rocks back together." Basically he has a lot of enthusiasm, but ends up spending a lot of time fixing problems he created by not having a good understanding what he was doing and being careful.
Well he keeps trying to convince me to come work for his new company. He is so happy because he makes a lot more money. They also think he's one of their best employees. That right there tells me all I need to know, and that I'd hate it. He's the kind of guy who will work 10-12 hour days 6-7 days a week. However much of that time is spent fixing problems he created. He replaces finesse with brute force. He does get things done, but no faster than someone "works smarter" to steal a management cliche and often slower.
The reason they think he's great is because he's always at work. He's a "hard worker". They value face time, not results. That is all kinds of not my place. I want a place, and work at a place, that is happy if you can solve a problem quickly and efficiently.
but new workers still need to get up to speed on project / code base / how other internal stuff works.
And just putting people in sink or swim can end very badly if some who does not know what they are doing messes up.
because if they don't they can't compete with the 100+ guys gunning for their job. If it ends badly you blame it on the worker and replace him. When labor's this cheap you can have a bunch of projects fail and not care. You're thinking like a worker, not an owner. An owner has twenty companies he owns. When they fail he writes the failure off on his taxes and moves on. If they all fail he uses his money to buy a bail out from the government (capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich).
:(. We're taught that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll win. But the big guys. The owners. The 'Capitalists'. They make the rules. You can't win like that. You can't even stay out of the gutter.
That trouble is, the way the world works doesn't match up with the economics we're taught in school
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Just got let go from a company that's running its employees into the ground. Management there doesn't care about the employees one bit. To them, people are just cattle, easily replaced. Warehouse staff have been on 70 hour work weeks for months. Warehouse supervisors that want to take some days off? (and they do have time to take) They're literally laughed at. Many of the best and most efficient employees have either been run off or fired. Oh, the positions were filled with temps though, so that's good right? Yeah. More staff than ever and getting half the work done. Many people have been made salaried just so they don't have to pay overtime. But you're expected to work extra and answer email at all hours. On vacation? You still better respond. Me? Worked hard, put in extra hours, did what I could with inadequate resources, still let go and immediately replaced. Any really, with many places anymore, the suck-ups get rewarded and the real workers get the shaft.
Comment on this tomorrow am, after checking Twitter & lolcats.
Okay, so say we stop looking at hours, and instead look at results...if we want to setup incentives for that, shouldn't we be paying by result? So let's say this week you get one good result, and next week you get five...should we pay you five times more the second week? Four times less the first week?
Now I'm not saying that there aren't problems with using hours as a proxy for worth, it's just that on the whole, there's a lot of variability on how much even the most efficient person can accomplish, and a lot of down time in between successes. We get a certain amount of stability when we're working by the hour, because our down time becomes a risk taken on by our employer.
That all being said, one of the most frustrating things is the tiny range of compensation versus the wide range of skill set in the knowledge business -> people who are ten times as efficient don't get paid ten times as much. But then again, if they essentially get to slack off 10 times as much as their inferior peers, but still get paid for those hours, I guess that's something... :)
A PHB is a PHB. If a supervisor is dumb enough to gauge employees by how long they work, he isn't going to evaluate "results" in an intelligent way, either. One of the less-good managers I worked for described himself as being "results-oriented." What it meant was that he engaged in short-term thinking and shallow evaluation. He could tell whether you said your work was "done" on time, so he rewarded that.
He had limited ability to evaluate the quality of your work, and next to no ability to evaluate whether you were doing it in a way that supported long-term goals such as maintainability and the ability to evolve, etc. Engineers scamped on infrastructure, nobody did any refactoring. Being a good engineer meant you slapped on duct tape rather than band-aids. (For the record, I got pretty good evaluations from him, because I was a duct-taper).
When SQA started to get in the way of on-time shipment, he successfully lobbied for the introduction of a new rule that only "new" bugs should be considered when judging completion. He argued that if customers tolerated a product, that meant that any bugs that were in that product were acceptable to customers and therefore not worth fixing.
Jim Goodnight, SAS Institute CEO, in: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-550102.html
Sara Robinson, http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/?page=entire
;-) who figured it out, but Henry Ford.
"Management Summary": It's not Karl Marx
If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.
Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.
When I think about all of this for a while, I keep coming back to the conclusion that in the U.S. today, half the problem lies with our own perceptions.
For many years, I worked in I.T. for manufacturing firms. Since the majority of their employees (and the ones directly handling the work that generated their profits!) were paid by the hour and punching time-cards, they definitely had a culture ingrained around the idea that the hardest workers were the folks you saw in the building most often. After all, you can't exactly take your work home with you if your job involves cutting steel beams or heat-treating metal in a blast furnace.
As much as the minority of us doing their I.T. liked to argue the fact that as "knowledge workers", we could do a lot of work from home and didn't need to keep long hours in the office? Truth is, we were often our own worst enemies because we'd complain when our co-workers weren't sitting at their desks. "What? He's out AGAIN? Must be nice! I guess I'll wind up taking these trouble tickets myself then...." And of course, everyone else working in the other departments sympathized and agreed that so-and-so wasn't doing their share since you were physically there and he wasn't. So it was immediately, short-term positive feedback from other employees and a strengthened sense that just by staying late, you could avoid being "that guy" you were just complaining about.
Now I'm doing work for a creative/marketing firm where we not only support direct-hire employees, but quite a few outside folks paid to work on various projects. The workforce is very mobile (so much so that we no longer issue anyone a desktop computer .... laptops only). People work all sorts of odd hours, not to mention hours that just feel odd to us because they're in different time zones. The one thing we don't have are employees punching in and out on time clocks. Still, you see some people (myself included at times) hanging around the office late, without any real good reason. Just can't quite shake that mentality that somehow, it doesn't look good to disappear when the clock strikes 5 all the time. I'm pretty sure management completely gets that it's your performance that matters -- not the hours you spend in the building. But it's tough for ME to completely put faith in that and start living differently!
at one company they have the 24 hour club. you have to be invited. this requires that you have demonstrated working in excess of 24 hours in the role of a hero. i played this role for many years early in my career. i'd rather hang out with the 6 hour club. the folks that know how to do 24 hours of work in 6 hours. there just is not any incentive for software teams to be efficient. and on that note. efficiency around the software life cycle for most teams in unachievable, it's not in the DNA for software teams to be efficient. consider for a moment that most work done once a developer checks in code, is symptom identification. the ever so popular continuous integration process is a big symptom identifier. symptom identification type processes don't scale. ask any software team what their budget is for symptom identification type process (defending against failure) versus root cause processes (pro-active, prepared for success).
They'll just measure results and hours, and if you're doing the work of 8 people in 40 hours a week they'll give you a "mixed" (read: bad) review for not coming in on the weekends. There is no concept of being content with a good worker. Which is just nuts. Workers frequently just get content with a good employer and ask for very little (aside from not taking away the things that make the job a good one).
What about the constant demand to be responsive to e-mails and phone calls that make it impossible to focus on a complex task that demands undivided attention? You know, the kind where you have to sit and stare off into space for an hour or two, mulling things over, until inspiration strikes?
HAY GUIZE IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION IS SAID YOU GOTTA BE DETAIL ORIENT AND ABLE TO MULTO-TASK, SO YOUR EXPECTED TO ANSWER THE E-MAILS *AND* DO YOUR WORK AT THE SAME TIME WITHOUT MAEKING ANY MISTAEKS. DURR HURR.
Seriously, sometimes the only quiet time you have is after everyone else goes home. When working with shared resources like servers, off-hours are sometimes a godsend, so that you don't have to listen to the constant prattling of the end-users, be they management, or otherwise.
Henry Ford was also the one who insisted on paying his workers well enough so that they could afford to buy his product. Good luck getting any of the greedy business people to go along with that anymore. The truly sad part is that Henry Ford was a greedy business person too, but he understood that he couldn't isolate his profits from the well-being of his workers.
In order to place performance over the appearance of labor, management will have to develoop some metrics for measuring actual work done. In its own right, this is a difficult problem in engineering, CS and other disciplines that involve creative, self directed and non-repetitive work*.
Problem: There are employees hiding among the ranks of professional who would never survive such a metric. They would push back against any adoption of actual performance criteria in favor of the status quo. Long hours is something that the untalented can achieve and keep their standing in the workplace.
* A 'professional', as defined in the NLRA.
Have gnu, will travel.
MY experience, as a registered and licensed Engineer, is that there is NO SUCH THING as an "Engineering" Team - one person is the responsible Engineer because the REGULATIONS require that the plans be signed by ONE PERSON so that the bureaucrats do not have to spend any of their valuable time finding the scapegoat.
The rest of this [expletive deleted] garbage ignoring the simple fact that any human being is NOT going to last very long when constantly abused, either physically or mentally, is just that [expletive deleted].
Look up maximum allowable shift hours for commercial nuclear power stations and the human factors design basis criteria developed by the USAF, I believe.
In my organization I've seen the sword cuts both ways. The engineers who don't meet delivery deadline dates are deemed as unsatisfactory and those engineers who record and bill their hours honestly are berated and evaluated as inferior for not being competent enough to complete their work within the standard 40 hours work week. An atmosphere has been cultivated where the sales department sells new business and makes obligations to customers without having any knowledge what so ever as to how long development actually takes. As a result, we all work night and weekends and 18 hour days but we can't bill these hours because there is a legitimate danger of getting a sub-standard evaluation for not being able to deliver within the sold amount of hours.
If you've got less work than time you're required to do it, and the company penalizes efficiency, there's a few age-old solutions.
For beginners: Hack it together in 10 minutes, screw around for 50, bill for an hour, lather, rinse, repeat, and you're a solid employee.
Advanced: The "Engineer Scott" method. Hack it together in 10 minutes, but don't tell anyone. Warn that there's almost no chance it can be done on time, or indeed that it can be done at all. Screw around for 50 minutes appearing (to the PHB) to be working. Pull it out of your ass -- you're a miracle worker.
Expert: Same as the "Engineer Scott" method, except you screw around for the first 50 minutes and hack it together in the last 10.
But there was a 19th century economist philosopher who had a very credible explanation for the relentless drive to increase working hours
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
All employees should be working at 100% of their ability during every hour and if employees are competent and giving full effort there shouldn't be drastic variations in work output. So the big variable should be number of hours worked.
In general the idea is that anyone who isn't giving full effort every hour of every day is a bad employee waiting to be caught and fired no matter how "good" they are at the job function. If you are giving full effort and producing substantially less you probably would benefit from training by someone who is "good" at the task and be able to produce increased output. Working extra hours is a sign of commitment to the task. So the guy who works extra hours but produces low output you train. The guy with high output who does the minimum needed to not look bad vs peers you try to motivate. The guy who produces high output and works extra hours you give maximum increases. The guy who produces high output, works extra hours, and is always telling you about the work that needed doing that he found and just did or is in the process of doing before you can tell him about it, you promote.
That is why this type of argument always fail with management. Why should producing more an hour mean you work less hours when it can mean you work the same number of hours and produce more?
It isn't all bullshit. There isn't a one to one correlation but in general when the company is raking in profits it is a hell of a lot easier to get broken things replaced and fixed and to get pay and benefit increases. Even in a fortune 500 where nobody gets real pay increases without a promotion, the company being flush means expansion which means room to promote more staff.
It's been my experience that often the ones that get promoted into management are the ones that put in long hours. Not necessarily productive hours, just long. Why do they get promoted? Because their bosses had to play the same game to get where they are. It's the same reason that management types tend to hire and promote others that think, look and act like they do. It's a club and if you want in you have to play by their rules.
Some managers have the mistaken belief that working longer is the same as working harder. Programming, for example, requires a great deal of concentration to do properly. After a certain number of work hours (varies by person) productivity drops off sharply. Fatigue sets in and mistakes multiply. I have seen this time and again, not just with myself but when I have managed others.
My view on it is that if people are having to work long hours then one of the following is to blame: a) the schedule is unrealistic b) the person is not working efficiently or c) skills are lacking. A or C are relatively easy to identify and fix. B is sometimes more difficult to spot. People often look busy without getting much done.
Long hours are easy to see, work ethic less so.
What AC said (shame he didn't put his user name behind it).
I've worked both as a developer and as a manager. As a manager, I considered myself to have two primary duties: (1) making sure that the requirements were as clear and stable as possible before handing them to my developers and (2) protecting my developers from questions, meeting invites, etc.
The manager I replaced hadn't done this. The developers were accustomed to answering questions from everybody, all the time. They were always starting off to implement x, then getting distracted with new requirement y, which was cancelled a few weeks later so that they could do z.
It was a major political battle to get the internal customers to understand that they were not allowed to contact my team except through me. It also took a solid year before the internal customers really accepted this, and began to see the benefits in the form of increased productivity.
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/The_Value_of_Working.pdf
'nuff said (or calculated in this case).
You can have one: either focus all of your energy into providing quality, or just keep showing up for the long hours and maybe someone will promote you.
The problem is that not everyone can achieve quality, so managers (like elementary school teachers) emphasize participation not results.
This means that in order to be seen as good at your job, you have to hang out at work for 10-12 hours. This means stretching everything you do and padding it with non-essentials. Eventually, you get accustomed to this pace. Surprise! You're now an ineffective worker, which means if they find someone else to hire, you may be out of a job, especially if you're near (or over) 50.
It would be better to emphasize quality work, have fewer people so that inter-personal communication is higher, and send everyone home after six hours to spend time with their families or to otherwise figure out their personal lives. People are such zombies because they spend all their time at work and then have no idea what to do with themselves in their off-hours.
I thought for a second I posted that conversation, I've had it quite a few times over my career :(
In most businesses, recognized efficiency results in increased work load.
Only the tech buzz has changed!
The toughest part of a project is the middle 80%.
- In the first 80% everyone is happy and optimistic
- In the second 80%, everyone is upset and shouting
- In the third 80%, everyone is resigned and praying the damned thing will have an end.
It must feel really great creating such environment, congratulations for making it real.
The really important (for me) question however is - how do you measure the team productivity (business value produced) and individual contribution/productivity? How do you show that the team has increased it's velocity? How do you note when people enter the comfort zone and start cruising, having lost their passion and "hunger"? Gut feeling is often not enough, unless it's your company and you have nobody to prove to things are going alright.
These questions are very important when arguing with management or when somebody joins the team only for the free ride and uses the success and the freedom without really contributing.
I absolutely refuse to work a second past quitting time. While I am not union, I have a union mentality. I highly value my personal time with my family. Americans in general allow themselves to be worked to death. The average American works 55 hours a week and is nervous about taking EARNED leave. Not only no, but hell no. I eared it, it's mine. I clock in at 0730 and out at 1630 Monday - Friday. I get requests to do tech work nights and weekends and I always turn it down, even if it pays. I don't want to even begin to set the precedent that I'm available to anyone after working hours have ended. More Americans need to stand up and just work their scheduled hours and then go home. Overtime, should, by law, be at least double time, and on holidays, triple or greater. People have a right to down time. People over profit is my motto and I'm standing by it. I'd rather have a 35k job with a boatload of time off than a 60k year job playing hell with hours and time off. Tech needs to be unionized.
It's real simple actually. In something like engineering and programming, one achieves optimum effectiveness only by working when at peak and not by working when tired or under the weather. The reason is simple. When you're tired or under the weather you make mistakes and inject errors into the work. It then takes much longer to find and correct those errors than it would have to have put off the work until one felt better and/or got some rest. The worst part is trying to finish off something that should take only a 'couple of hours' that most often turns into a late nighter oftimes followed by either a couple of extra days to diagnose and fix the errors that would never have been injected if people were operating at their peak mental capacities - or far worse - have fatal flaws that manifest themselves out in the field weeks or months later. No manager should be allowed to manage if they don't understand that the earlier a problem is identified and corrected, the easier it is to find and fix.
That said, there is the different situation of putting in typical 50-60 hours per week for beginners trying to learn the details. College does not prepare one to do the work needed in engineering and software design other than to show them the basics of how to get started. All that extra time may be spent on the job or it may be spent on personal projects in order to develop skills. Without spending a couple of years or more doing it is going to result in a very short career. However, turning it into a lifestyle choice is likely to make it a short career also.
while the general opinion here is that working long hours does not improve productivity in software development, most of the people commenting here are cave geeks that put in 12+ hour days anyways. A smart manager realizes that forcing a cave geek to work 12 hours days will cause dissention, but giving them the freedom to set their set their own hours will pay back in high productivity because the cave geek really doesn't want to leave their workstations.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.