My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It's not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won't know until you start.
What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.
Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress
on the whole team to maintain.
What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
I personally know several people from amazon, pretty much all of them acknowledged the crazy oncall expectations there. Combine that with the pip culture and visa issues, and your statement above about being "no more stressed than anyone else" is just ridiculous
Expecting people to work at 1AM, romanticizing them as "heroes"... that's not a normal culture. That's not a healthy lifestyle for the employee and can lead to long term health consequences. And it never applies to everyone equally, because why would you call them "heroes" in the first place
It's one thing if management expects it, it's another thing if I as an employee choose to trade 4 daytime hours for 4 nighttime hours because I know I can be more productive at that time. But building that type of management expectation into a work culture is a red flag
Yeah I'm not talking about being "on call". I don't know anything about Amazon other than it's probably full of bad culture. Nowhere I've worked has ever been like that except a handful of emergencies.
I'm talking about working at a relaxed place because everyone actually gets their stuff done 9 to 5. A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two or whenever else motivation strikes to keep it that way.
I'm saying that these little nudges from the team where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work.
This sounds more like a Visa problem though. I think the best stress reliever is when you know you are safe losing your job or walking away by yourself, you have enough money saved that you can spend more than a year doing whatever you want even if you were to lose your job and without having to worry about it influencing your life. Then the motivator to do long hours and work at odd times is passion, desire to climb and feeling of ownership rather than fear of losing your job.
"Crazy on-call expectations that require you to be available and potentially working at any hour of the day and night" is something very different than the topic under discussion, and I didn't interpret sublinear's comment at all to be endorsing that viewpoint.
this isn't about 'on-call' or 'expectations.' Eg, I'm currently looking at a work problem casually (it's about 11 PM) because I have some time and I'm curious, so I can slack off tomorrow at work. Win win.
I have seen this repeated so often, but let me put something clear: If your work constantly requires weird hours when it could realistically be a 9-to-5 job if they just hired enough/the right people or had their marbles together in terms of organization — then the only reason you need to do this is mis-management.
I worked in the film industry where you are sometimes for actual physical reasons (the sun being the sun) required to work weird hours. Excuse my french here, but only idiots wear bad work schedules as a badge of honor. Bonus points for when you confuse the thin bond you form with the other victims of such abuse with friendship. If you constantly need to overschedule people, you did a bad job at resource allocation. If your work load is constantly on the edge and things are always "exciting" for all the wrong reasons, you are managed by incapable fools. In a smooth operation the content of the work is exciting, the schedule and the work hours boring.
You can call yourself a "hero", but it is your life (that all of us only get one of) you're wasting. If you ask me (and you didn't) there is better a good reason each time it is wasted like that.
Don't get me wrong, I am willing to step in to do the extra mile when there is a good reason, but in my experience it is very rare that there truly is. If the content of my work is exciting I can easily go for the whole day, but it would be in the interest of my employer to stop me, so I can do this for months without burnout and fatigue.
Especially in IT, most deadlines are arbitrary moments in time, pulled out of someone's ass. If the deadline is so tight that people need to work more hours, either there has to be a very good reason which there very well might be, or someone's shit at making deadlines. Then admit you did poorly at planning, move the deadline, and only then can you start thinking about making your people work overtime.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am.
Please don’t call these people “heroes”, and if you’re doing this, please stop. You’re setting expectations that everyone else should also be up at 1am “casually looking at work”, and if they’re not, they’re not a true “hero”.
This is how unhealthy work/life balance starts at companies. People that work after hours for fun is is called workaholism. Meanwhile, the people that are also having fun from 9-5 are suddenly not doing enough, and are no longer having fun.
And of course the “heroes” are not stressed — they’re able to enjoy working long hours, and making their way up the ranks by being a “hero”.
Framing abuse and alienation as heroism is how capitalism extracts value from the most precious resource in our decadent lives: time and energy.
Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.
Agreed. It's important to put enough effort that you find meaning in your work, but not so much that it ruins your wellbeing. Here's a rough algorithm that works for me:
1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task.
2. Double it and let the team know you did that.
3. Do the work well including good documentation.
4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope.
5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule.
I agree. This requires a healthy workplace though.
I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again.
It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)
In my humble opinion you have started totally on something that a study/poll like this doesn’t even point to.
You are talking about I/we/people “wanting/loving/preferring” to work at certain hours or for certain length of hours (usually not often or not regularly/daily) compared to being “asked/made/forced/expected” to work that way often/regularly/daily.
> Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow.
It could be argued that code exploration at the pace you need should be part of your regular working hours, if that is what is needed to do your job efficiently. In the extreme, not allowing your employees to do so is failed management.
Of course, the knowledge and efficiency you gain by doing so is not measurable by any quantifiable metric, so it's easy to see how it will be conveniently discarded as unnecessarily.
Even better, by having you convinced that it is something you should do in your own free time, they can reap the benefits without the costs. Full profit.
> Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly.
You need more predictability than that in most things. Even start ups. The picture you are painting is of a badly organized company that needs to slow down a bit and ... think.
I have worked for that kind of company and the more boring sort. The more boring sort tends to make more profit.
Startups might be different, but it must be intentful chaos - not getting caught up in pointless busywork.
> Some days you can stop early.
Rarely. The only companies that allow that are probably the ones that made you do a 24h stint the day before.
Form the point of view of a maker / contributor it's common sense that the more tired you are, the worse your output will be. For me, there is a cut off point where the time spent working "tired" or after hours is just not worth the return anymore.
That said, not every work is directly "building" - some aspects of a job might involve collaboration, communication and helping others out when they're stuck. Spending some time after hours to help a colleague who got stuck might have a result which is disproportionately larger to the input that a tired person had.
I'd guess most people have had the experience of working late and beating their head against a problem for hours, leaving it, and solving it in minutes the next morning.
This isn't about opinion. There's increasing hard evidence that limited hours and a four day work week don't just increase employee happiness, they increase productivity and company value.
The question isn't "Why do only some people regularly want to work long hours?" but "Why are long hours considered heroic, when in fact they cause predictable harm to individuals and organisations?"
It's not just IT. Law, medicine, finance, and even big-name architecture all have the same culture of professional hazing where newcomers are expected to give themselves stress-related PTSD before they're allowed to start climbing the ladder.
And the abuse becomes generational because of "It never did me any harm" - when in fact it clearly did.
I'm in the "creative" field (aka, visual time-based arts, so to speak, but honestly, it's "work," and in the same vein, every other job is teeming with much-needed creativity that often doesn't get translated to visual arts, but that's an aside). But this is how I approach my work as well. All that is to say, I really appreciate this post, and it's very validating to whatever I've experienced in the "creative" visual arts field. Which to me kinda points to larger meta patterns that emerge from work in general.
In my younger days when I worked in an office, my "in-office" time was largely just seat-warming, because it's very difficult for me to actually get much done in the office environments that companies seem to prefer. Instead, I'd actually do my work on my "off hours", when I can be in a productive environment.
As I aged, though, I started wanting to have a life outside of programming, so stopped that practice. Now my employer has to be happy with whatever I can get done during work hours, but I have a much happier life.
There is a difference between being excited about learning this fancy technology thing in your 20ies and having to deal with the same basic shit to afford desirable lifestyle in 30ies.
> Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.
Part of me thinks that it's an open secret that this is the only way anything of real quality gets done. I've been burned by investing too much into pet projects, though.
> My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it.
Why? Just work your hours.
Once I grew out of the initial imposter syndrom in my first job, I would never work late for some arbitrary deadline.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
Oh please. They are losers getting abused, not heroes. And they wage dump the rest of us.
You can get away with romantizing that for hackers or business owners in the startup phase. That is like 0,5% of us.
> It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project
While I understand the sentiment (BTDT and thoroughly enjoyed it!) it is very important to see this as a management failure. If something is vital (or even mildly important) to the success of a project, it must be accounted for in the timeline and properly resourced.
Anything else leads to deathmarch projects where the extra free work after hours becomes more and more expected and required, no longer a fun diversion.
You only see people going on-call with no stress because everyone else burned out and quit. Very simple selection effect. Declaring that things can never be better and that this is fine prevents us from finding useful and meaningful improvements that will make our teams happier, healthier, more productive, more stable, and more inclusive.
Well, as long as you don't expect others to perform in similar way all is fine.
Since, you know, we have this tiny little thing called actual life we enjoy living, which definitely absolutely 100% doesn't happen in front of screen, any screen. Or you/we have kids. Or need 7-8h of sleep like a normal person does.
Doesn't matter at the end what are the reasons, I know on my proverbial death bed (and all years from right now leading to it) I would regret massively spending more time at work then necessary, since it eats time I can do everything else. Life is awesome if you do some effort to make it so. Not so much without that effort part, then even that screen may look like a good use of time. Also life is much much shorter than youngish folks feel like it is, and the window for great experiences is much smaller.
>Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours
>Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers
Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.
To me, it reads like this: “those who log off of Slack are more productive” which matches my experience perfectly. My productivity shoots up as soon as I close Slack.
Isn't this just a variation of "those who feel more productive during the day log off earlier"? Or reversing the statement, "those who feel less productive during the day feel compelled to work longer hours"?
A lot of this stuff seems obvious and self-evident, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of it was supported by actual research, but you're absolutely right that self-reported data gathered from internet surveys is questionable at best.
Every person has their own definition of what their "productivity" even means, they each have only their own subjective measures of their own productivity, and there's no verification to check who is providing the data, to catch those who simply outright lie or to catch people who click through the survey without even reading/understanding what is asked. Two people could both report 10% higher productivity when in fact there is nothing similar about their productivity levels at all.
Internet polls and surveys are cheap and easy which is why so many people use them, and they can be pretty fun when all you're trying to find out is which celebrities are popular or which harry potter character you are, but they are generally terrible for getting data useful for actual science or for anything where accuracy matters. It's no wonder that there's such a huge reproducibility problem in social sciences considering the heavy reliance on self-reported data through internet surveys.
Welcome to evidence in the soft sciences. I can't really blame them though, the kind of experiments needed to really measure these kinds of things would never past muster with an ethics board.
You could say the opposite is true as well. How do you know after hours workers are not rating their productivity higher than actual? How do you know that the 9-5 workers aren’t rating their productivity as lower than usual?
All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
It’s the nature of the study that parent comment is referring to.
If a study is self-reporting, it’s an observational study which can only establish correlation, meaning the study can only say, “there might be something here that warrants a further research”.
A clinical trial is needed to establish causation.
So while 10k sample size reduces the error bars, it only increases the confidence that there might be something here worth doing a more rigorous study later.
“All data in of itself is useless”…what does that even mean? That’s like saying a chair in of itself is useless because no one is sitting in it. And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless.
Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.
> All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
The point isn't the size. The point is there are too many confounding factors. It could be that people who work longer hours do so because they are high on trait conscientiousness, which also causes them to report low productivity
It could even be because they are conscientious that they actually work slightly slower, and/or it could be that people who are less conscientious just don't care as mcuh about producing what was expected.
To paraphrase the late Hitch: productivity metrics are not great. Neither is the word "connection" in science-adjacent reporting.
Especially how it is phrased with "feel obligated", it's clear these are people who are conscientious about their productivity and most likely set a higher bar for their output. It's hard to think their out of hours work is causing their loss of productivity, rather their work environment is causing it and only the people who feel bad about it (ie: would report that their productivity wasn't adequate) actually work longer hours to compensate.
Workers who feel they're less productive work more. Which makes perfect sense. Workers who feel they're less productive may be more likely to try to compensate or worried that they will be fired.
For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat:
"On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."
I personally do this a great deal. So many things that are not coding in life (from visiting museums to getting lunch with a friend to going to a government office to getting medical tests done) are far easier during normal work hours.
Coding can be done at midnight, when none of those things can be done.
I'm pretty much retired but I have zero sense of holidays. I always worked much more efficiently when everyone left the office, and 3 or 4 day weekends were always pure heaven. (I liked my work though.)
I read this as "who prefers to work non-standard workday" e.g. 11-7 which I used to do to avoid traffic. I really enjoyed it and the slower morning was really helpful for me. early morning stand-ups post-pandemic really killed my morning happiness.
I wonder if that means pursuing work-related personal ambitions (i.e. promotion), or outside-work personal ambitions (i.e. side projects)? Could side projects actually reduce burnout?
Before I thought I had ADHD I would sit around the office not doing much of anything in a sort of "ready" state, ready to jump on the next thing someone would try to distract me with or "ready" for the next meeting that is sometimes more than an hour away.
It's only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(
Same for me. I struggle to get much done during the day. Way too many distractions. I become quite productive around 4pm and onwards. And yes, I have been officially diagnosed with ADHD. I sometimes do take low-dose meds. And they appear to help.
What most IT people think of as “real work” is being able to concentrate on a problem and work towards solving it. This is a creative type of work, and requires a quiet mind that can focus. When you’re in fire-fighting mode, the fight/flight/freeze survival hormones are active, which suppresses creativity (it’s not smart to be thinking about your next cave painting when there’s a lion stalking you).
Being in one or the other mode is normal, and not related to ADHD.
Can we not do this? Being in a "ready mode" because you have a meeting in an hour is a common experience among those with ADHD. It's totally unrelated to a "fight or fight" response.
When someone relates an experience you don't understand, it's a natural reaction to assume it's actually a different experience that you do understand. I know because I catch myself doing this all the time, too. But let's understand that we have that cognitive bias and resist the temptation to "well, actually" people. (One technique that's helpful to me is to rephrase my comment as a question instead of a correction.)
As for different types of work, meetings are important and are work, but it still is frustrating when they make it difficult to get your other work done. That's not about whether certain kinds of work are legitimate. If you're late on something and you tell your manager that you had too many meetings and couldn't get into a productive flow on those tasks - that will not be seen as a legitimate reason not to have completed your assigned tasks. (Similarly, having your flow interrupted will not be seen as a legitimate reason to have fewer meetings. I've had a manager deny my request to skip a meeting - while I was fighting a production incident preventing a "must win" customer from using the product. This was something the CEO had directly told us was priority 0.) Thus, you end up working more hours, and you can't dedicate as much time to other parts of your life, like family and self care. Which can lead to burnout.
People like that tend to work in the wrong ways and always make up for it in extra time and stress. If they said "no more extra time" they might be more willing to change the bad habits that lead them to be unproductive.
I've seen it a lot. People become so used to their zombie state they waste hours without really thinking and if they just stopped and analyzed the situation, they'd approach things in a much better way or troubleshoot rather fast.
Obviously, it's all mixed with career incentives and so many other factors, but I'm a big proponent on having people work on their contractual quantity of hours and not more (except on a rare occasion which ahould not happen often, like 1-3 times in a year).
They do mention it in passing, but there is no way to statistically control for that without a randomised controlled trial (or Mendelian Randomisation).
There is no reason to think that working outside hours is the cause of the problem. It could be a consequence of an individual struggling outside of work that then leads to having to try to catch up.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the marketers who wrote this have probably heard of a control variable at some point in their life.
If I'm really into what I'm doing I'll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I'm doing it a secret (don't push commits, just keep changes local).
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What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.
Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.
What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
I personally know several people from amazon, pretty much all of them acknowledged the crazy oncall expectations there. Combine that with the pip culture and visa issues, and your statement above about being "no more stressed than anyone else" is just ridiculous
Expecting people to work at 1AM, romanticizing them as "heroes"... that's not a normal culture. That's not a healthy lifestyle for the employee and can lead to long term health consequences. And it never applies to everyone equally, because why would you call them "heroes" in the first place
It's one thing if management expects it, it's another thing if I as an employee choose to trade 4 daytime hours for 4 nighttime hours because I know I can be more productive at that time. But building that type of management expectation into a work culture is a red flag
I'm talking about working at a relaxed place because everyone actually gets their stuff done 9 to 5. A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two or whenever else motivation strikes to keep it that way.
I'm saying that these little nudges from the team where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work.
Get the 1am lover to do 9-5 they will be as miserable as the 7-3 guy being woken up a 1am
This conversation feels very similar to comp conversations where outliers drive the discussion.
I worked in the film industry where you are sometimes for actual physical reasons (the sun being the sun) required to work weird hours. Excuse my french here, but only idiots wear bad work schedules as a badge of honor. Bonus points for when you confuse the thin bond you form with the other victims of such abuse with friendship. If you constantly need to overschedule people, you did a bad job at resource allocation. If your work load is constantly on the edge and things are always "exciting" for all the wrong reasons, you are managed by incapable fools. In a smooth operation the content of the work is exciting, the schedule and the work hours boring.
You can call yourself a "hero", but it is your life (that all of us only get one of) you're wasting. If you ask me (and you didn't) there is better a good reason each time it is wasted like that.
Don't get me wrong, I am willing to step in to do the extra mile when there is a good reason, but in my experience it is very rare that there truly is. If the content of my work is exciting I can easily go for the whole day, but it would be in the interest of my employer to stop me, so I can do this for months without burnout and fatigue.
Especially in IT, most deadlines are arbitrary moments in time, pulled out of someone's ass. If the deadline is so tight that people need to work more hours, either there has to be a very good reason which there very well might be, or someone's shit at making deadlines. Then admit you did poorly at planning, move the deadline, and only then can you start thinking about making your people work overtime.
Please don’t call these people “heroes”, and if you’re doing this, please stop. You’re setting expectations that everyone else should also be up at 1am “casually looking at work”, and if they’re not, they’re not a true “hero”.
This is how unhealthy work/life balance starts at companies. People that work after hours for fun is is called workaholism. Meanwhile, the people that are also having fun from 9-5 are suddenly not doing enough, and are no longer having fun.
And of course the “heroes” are not stressed — they’re able to enjoy working long hours, and making their way up the ranks by being a “hero”.
Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.
1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task.
2. Double it and let the team know you did that.
3. Do the work well including good documentation.
4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope.
5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule.
Cheers
I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again.
It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)
You are talking about I/we/people “wanting/loving/preferring” to work at certain hours or for certain length of hours (usually not often or not regularly/daily) compared to being “asked/made/forced/expected” to work that way often/regularly/daily.
> There are so many heroes
Heroes? Really? Okay.
It could be argued that code exploration at the pace you need should be part of your regular working hours, if that is what is needed to do your job efficiently. In the extreme, not allowing your employees to do so is failed management.
Of course, the knowledge and efficiency you gain by doing so is not measurable by any quantifiable metric, so it's easy to see how it will be conveniently discarded as unnecessarily.
Even better, by having you convinced that it is something you should do in your own free time, they can reap the benefits without the costs. Full profit.
You need more predictability than that in most things. Even start ups. The picture you are painting is of a badly organized company that needs to slow down a bit and ... think.
I have worked for that kind of company and the more boring sort. The more boring sort tends to make more profit.
Startups might be different, but it must be intentful chaos - not getting caught up in pointless busywork.
> Some days you can stop early.
Rarely. The only companies that allow that are probably the ones that made you do a 24h stint the day before.
That said, not every work is directly "building" - some aspects of a job might involve collaboration, communication and helping others out when they're stuck. Spending some time after hours to help a colleague who got stuck might have a result which is disproportionately larger to the input that a tired person had.
This isn't about opinion. There's increasing hard evidence that limited hours and a four day work week don't just increase employee happiness, they increase productivity and company value.
The question isn't "Why do only some people regularly want to work long hours?" but "Why are long hours considered heroic, when in fact they cause predictable harm to individuals and organisations?"
It's not just IT. Law, medicine, finance, and even big-name architecture all have the same culture of professional hazing where newcomers are expected to give themselves stress-related PTSD before they're allowed to start climbing the ladder.
And the abuse becomes generational because of "It never did me any harm" - when in fact it clearly did.
As I aged, though, I started wanting to have a life outside of programming, so stopped that practice. Now my employer has to be happy with whatever I can get done during work hours, but I have a much happier life.
You’re insane.
Part of me thinks that it's an open secret that this is the only way anything of real quality gets done. I've been burned by investing too much into pet projects, though.
Why? Just work your hours.
Once I grew out of the initial imposter syndrom in my first job, I would never work late for some arbitrary deadline.
> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.
Oh please. They are losers getting abused, not heroes. And they wage dump the rest of us.
You can get away with romantizing that for hackers or business owners in the startup phase. That is like 0,5% of us.
While I understand the sentiment (BTDT and thoroughly enjoyed it!) it is very important to see this as a management failure. If something is vital (or even mildly important) to the success of a project, it must be accounted for in the timeline and properly resourced.
Anything else leads to deathmarch projects where the extra free work after hours becomes more and more expected and required, no longer a fun diversion.
Since, you know, we have this tiny little thing called actual life we enjoy living, which definitely absolutely 100% doesn't happen in front of screen, any screen. Or you/we have kids. Or need 7-8h of sleep like a normal person does.
Doesn't matter at the end what are the reasons, I know on my proverbial death bed (and all years from right now leading to it) I would regret massively spending more time at work then necessary, since it eats time I can do everything else. Life is awesome if you do some effort to make it so. Not so much without that effort part, then even that screen may look like a good use of time. Also life is much much shorter than youngish folks feel like it is, and the window for great experiences is much smaller.
Dead Comment
>Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers
Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.
Not everyone is a line dev who codes 7 hours after a 10 minute standup.
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Every person has their own definition of what their "productivity" even means, they each have only their own subjective measures of their own productivity, and there's no verification to check who is providing the data, to catch those who simply outright lie or to catch people who click through the survey without even reading/understanding what is asked. Two people could both report 10% higher productivity when in fact there is nothing similar about their productivity levels at all.
Internet polls and surveys are cheap and easy which is why so many people use them, and they can be pretty fun when all you're trying to find out is which celebrities are popular or which harry potter character you are, but they are generally terrible for getting data useful for actual science or for anything where accuracy matters. It's no wonder that there's such a huge reproducibility problem in social sciences considering the heavy reliance on self-reported data through internet surveys.
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All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
If a study is self-reporting, it’s an observational study which can only establish correlation, meaning the study can only say, “there might be something here that warrants a further research”.
A clinical trial is needed to establish causation.
So while 10k sample size reduces the error bars, it only increases the confidence that there might be something here worth doing a more rigorous study later.
No it’s not. No sample size can make up for other biases.
Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.
The point isn't the size. The point is there are too many confounding factors. It could be that people who work longer hours do so because they are high on trait conscientiousness, which also causes them to report low productivity
It could even be because they are conscientious that they actually work slightly slower, and/or it could be that people who are less conscientious just don't care as mcuh about producing what was expected.
To paraphrase the late Hitch: productivity metrics are not great. Neither is the word "connection" in science-adjacent reporting.
Maybe people who are less productive end up having to work more hours.
https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_r...
Especially how it is phrased with "feel obligated", it's clear these are people who are conscientious about their productivity and most likely set a higher bar for their output. It's hard to think their out of hours work is causing their loss of productivity, rather their work environment is causing it and only the people who feel bad about it (ie: would report that their productivity wasn't adequate) actually work longer hours to compensate.
Workers who feel they're less productive work more. Which makes perfect sense. Workers who feel they're less productive may be more likely to try to compensate or worried that they will be fired.
"On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."
Coding can be done at midnight, when none of those things can be done.
A core part of burnout is lack of control, and a side project can give you that feeling back - if you do it for the joy of it.
It's only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(
Being in one or the other mode is normal, and not related to ADHD.
When someone relates an experience you don't understand, it's a natural reaction to assume it's actually a different experience that you do understand. I know because I catch myself doing this all the time, too. But let's understand that we have that cognitive bias and resist the temptation to "well, actually" people. (One technique that's helpful to me is to rephrase my comment as a question instead of a correction.)
As for different types of work, meetings are important and are work, but it still is frustrating when they make it difficult to get your other work done. That's not about whether certain kinds of work are legitimate. If you're late on something and you tell your manager that you had too many meetings and couldn't get into a productive flow on those tasks - that will not be seen as a legitimate reason not to have completed your assigned tasks. (Similarly, having your flow interrupted will not be seen as a legitimate reason to have fewer meetings. I've had a manager deny my request to skip a meeting - while I was fighting a production incident preventing a "must win" customer from using the product. This was something the CEO had directly told us was priority 0.) Thus, you end up working more hours, and you can't dedicate as much time to other parts of your life, like family and self care. Which can lead to burnout.
Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it?
Is it that after hours works causes loss of productivity or is that slow people work after hours to try to make up for falling behind?
a. they've gotten as far as they can given incomplete inputs/scope
b. and they're not going to prioritize further meetings until the lead provides what they need
Not being a "team player" in a fuzzy sense is actually "helping the team" prioritize efficiently!
From my experience it's the opposite, the people who are falling behind aren't the ones working irregular hours
People like that tend to work in the wrong ways and always make up for it in extra time and stress. If they said "no more extra time" they might be more willing to change the bad habits that lead them to be unproductive.
I've seen it a lot. People become so used to their zombie state they waste hours without really thinking and if they just stopped and analyzed the situation, they'd approach things in a much better way or troubleshoot rather fast.
Obviously, it's all mixed with career incentives and so many other factors, but I'm a big proponent on having people work on their contractual quantity of hours and not more (except on a rare occasion which ahould not happen often, like 1-3 times in a year).
There is no reason to think that working outside hours is the cause of the problem. It could be a consequence of an individual struggling outside of work that then leads to having to try to catch up.
They don’t. It’s an observational, self-reporting study, which can only establish correlation, and not causation.
* Work for a small company
* Show up at 10am
* Leave at 4pm
If I'm really into what I'm doing I'll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I'm doing it a secret (don't push commits, just keep changes local).