"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/101988/should-developers-accept-overtime-weekend-work-denied-bonus-payments/101989#101989

by zzzeek • 15 years ago

323 162 15 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

bitops• 15 years ago

A lot of nice feel good answers on this post. But for some of us, too freaking bad if you have to work long hours.

I'm not personally a fan of long hours, but not everyone can work for a LinkedIn. And in many shops, long hours are unavoidable regardless of how much well-intentioned process is in place.

peteretep• 15 years ago

I realize it's rarely this simple, but get a new job if you care. The labour market is a market, and unless you leave, citing whichever of manager incompetence or lack of money is the problem, it won't get fixed because /it doesn't need to be fixed/.

pnathan• 15 years ago

That is a sign of bad planning & bad management.

And software engineers' acquiescence to being abused like that ensures that it will continue.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

Routine long hours are sign of a broken process.

Rare spats of long hours due to abnormal events is not an issue

liljimmytables• 15 years ago

Or even due to awesome coding. I would hate to miss out on my occasional bouts of can't-drag-me-away-from-the-keyboard inspiration simply because someone "fixed" my work ethic and shut the office at 5pm.

But yeah, I appreciate the sentiment that no-one should be allowed to pillage their workers' evenings and weekends simply because they don't want to tell their boss "I promised something I couldn't deliver."

gte910h7• 15 years ago

Courage is underrated in the tech industry.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

One thing I would like to do: Lock people out of email account s/phone numbers/skype during a vacation :OD

I DO think that's a valid separation.

mburney• 15 years ago

I'm curious how efficient most coders are even in an 8 hour work day. I find that I can only log about 4 - 5 hours a day (on average) of solid coding time (or marketing/business work). This is because I limit myself to an 8 hour work day, but of course there are breaks and inevitable down time.

orlick• 15 years ago

Our startup team of 10 has kept pretty strict time logs for the past 3 years. We have an official policy of 40 hour work weeks, but yeah, no developers are able to have that much productive time. Usually we see about 25-30 hours of solid development time, 5 hours of meeting/admin time, and 5 hours of lunches/coffee/break time.

djb_hackernews2• 15 years ago

I'd like to hear more about the choice to keep strict time logs in a startup environment. Especially strict ones that provide enough granularity to see 5 hours of break time/wk.

hugh32• 15 years ago

If you can honestly spend 75% of your office time doing actual development, and divide the rest evenly between breaks and meetings, I'd like to see how.

I've recently got into pomodoro timing. I set the timer for 45 minutes, focus totally on work, then take a fifteenish-minute break. I can't do it all day though.

I know the classic pomodoro technique is supposed to be 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, but a five minute break is too short for me (I like to get out of the building) and the rhythm of the half-hours just goes by too quickly. 45 minute serious-work periods work much better for me.

run4yourlives• 15 years ago

I think 37Signals is completely accurate with their assessment of working time. It mirrors your take of a maximum of 4-5 hour blocks that can effectively considered "productive work".

gte910h7• 15 years ago

Yeah, I get crap using those numbers on estimates. I still don't redo math because people dislike them though.

gaustin• 15 years ago

Same here. But somehow the numbers always get recalculated when they pass through my supervisor's hands.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

I was just thankfully let go from a startup that expected extra hours on top of running an open-plan office and coworkers who lived by the "who can interrupt the loudest?!" method of project management. 4-5 hour stretches were never once achieved during normal business hours in the 2.5 months I was there. A 2 hour stretch was a gift, but more often than not the quietude would be broken by one of a small group (3-4) loudest coworkers.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

Open floor plans are evil for developers. Whoever started that trend needs to be strung up by their nose hair. There is no better way to ensure no work gets done than putting 10 people in an environment that every two person conversation interrupts (and I believe that "15 minutes to get back into the zone" is a bunch of crap).

PakG1• 15 years ago

Sounds about right. http://www.businessinsider.com/leave-work-early-2011-5

malkia3• 15 years ago

This broken process ships a lot of games :(

tomjen3• 15 years ago

I used to think so too, but the truth is that it ships at most 7 or so games, the rest being copies of that with slight (mostly trivial) variations.

I don't know how many hours Braids creator worked, but I have a feeling that it was a lot less than a deathmarch.

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

It ships a lot of derivative and buggy games while chewing up game developers like consumables.

malkia3• 15 years ago

But still makes money, and that seems to matter most for certain people.

Hisoka• 15 years ago

It's nice that LinkedIn has a great process: regression testing and the like, but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every single little thing, and where business models, let alone requirements change constantly (ie. a startup)? What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours? What if there is a mission-critical bug that has to be fixed by the end of the day or else all your customers will bail out?

Secondly, most who work in Wall Street will tell you it's not about the process. It's about the culture. People don't work until 7 or 8 because they're fixing bugs, or because development is so slow. It's because they're expected to and if they get up and leave at 5, it leaves a bad impression on management and their co-workers.

djb_hackernews2• 15 years ago

Those sound like outliers and they happen. I think he was getting at chronic long work days.

However, I'd like to make a few points.

regression tests should be baked in from the start, especially easy at a startup starting from fresh.

Features that can be implemented in 48 hours have no business being in the way of your success.

Mission critical bugs are a symptom of a broken process. They happen, but shouldn't be pathological.

Yes, and that culture stinks. Luckily for software developers at this point in time we have MANY options and don't have to be subject to shitty working conditions.

plastics• 15 years ago

If your company is put out of business by a feature from a competitor you can not copy it within 48 hours, you do not have a business.

rokhayakebe2• 15 years ago

What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours?

Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days, I am pretty sure this has never happened.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Facebook suddenly rushing out stuff as Google+ launches.

Reddit having to work crazy to take up the exodus from Digg.

That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I honestly can't remember your name!).

Perpetuum having a mass of new players because of the Eve monocle incident.

I'm sure others can think of times when one business has had to react rapidly to either manoeuvres or failures of another business.

Not quite put out of business, but massive opportunity cost if the reaction is not made.

reginaldo• 15 years ago

And if it happened, it was because the company was out of business already...

Daniel_Newby• 15 years ago

Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days ...

Ah, like the PlayStation Network security debacle.

ww520• 15 years ago

These are nice excuses managers give to rally workers to work overtime.

cksk• 15 years ago

What if you work in a construction site where they cannot afford helmets?

And what difference does it make to call it a cultural thing? People are still getting their heads injured.

DougWebb• 15 years ago

If a feature can be duplicated in 48 hours, it's a trivial feature. If your business is that dependent on trivial features, it's a really precarious business.

zzzeek2• 15 years ago

I'm not necessarily taking a side here, but the arguments might be along the lines of a. how is it that you didn't think of some feature capable of killing your whole business in 48 hours ahead of time (poor planning) b. why did you launch a mission-critical bug (not enough testing) ?

As for Wall Street, they do many amazing things sure but I'd hope that the WS culture is not the one we're all aspiring towards.

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every single little thing

What if you were performing surgery in an environment where you couldn't afford to sterilize every single instrument?

LargeWu• 15 years ago

* but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every single little thing, and where business models, let alone requirements change constantly (ie. a startup)?*

Constantly changing requirements are exactly why you want tests. Not only do they help you find regression bugs when requirements change, but they help tremendously in writing code that is easy to maintain. If you can't test a piece of code, it's a red flag that you can't easily change it either.

Furthermore, I don't buy the notion that writing test code adds significant time to the development process. I do not have metrics, but I would argue that a good test suite actually reduces total development time, since the time writing tests is more than offset by the time saved testing manually and fixing bugs later.

robryan4• 15 years ago

A pretty good example of what you are talking about is AirBnB, sure they may have had some of the security features in the pipeline but the pressure was really on them to at least get something out the represented a step in the right direction shortly after what happened. I'm pretty sure they must have had people pull some big hours to put together such a comprehensive security features overhaul so quickly.

dave_sullivan2• 15 years ago

I know a lot of people who seem to like working long hours. It allows them to think they're getting more done, but I suspect that many of the processes involved could be optimized if they thought about it a bit. For me, I work long hours but it's spread out over the course of a day (so removing breaks/bs it's probably not much more than 40 hours p/wk), and I love what I do, so I do get a lot done (and it feels less like work than other jobs I've had).

For other jobs, like being a big firm lawyer, long hours are kind of baked in: You get paid a salary (a big one), the company you work for bills you out by the hour, person with the highest billables doesn't get fired. That's probably not likely to change, it's not a process problem per se, and I suspect there's plenty other jobs generally like that.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

There is an opposite though. Legal projects don't really seem to have budgets like software projects do.

I know at my rates, if I work 14 hour days, my productivity shoots down, and I blow the face and upper body off the budget in no time.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

There is an opposite though. Legal projects don't really seem to have budgets like software projects do.

I know at my rates, if I work 14 hour days, my productivity shoots down, and I blow the face and upper body off the budget in no time. I tell people this, but they still want it sometimes. But really, it's usually better to cut expectations and go at a measured pace all the time.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

At the company I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the biggest proponents of long hours were a couple of (hourly, natch) contractors who were practicing the most aggravating form of Mortgage-Driven Development I've ever witnessed firsthand. Then salaried people were hounded to work extra hours to keep up with their sh-- code.

Cushman• 15 years ago

This story is better if you read it as the contractors actually made you write the project in sh.

T-hawk• 15 years ago

I've known at least a few guys who did indeed like working long hours in the office, since that was less stressful than going home to a house full of cranky kids at bedtime. One co-worker even relished his 1.5 hour commute as the only relaxing parts of his day.

I often like to hang around the office to take care of personal business-but-not-work stuff between 6 and 7 pm. Things like personal finance, doing accounting for this one volunteer organization (I'm treasurer), browsing and booking personal travel. I never want to do that stuff once I'm at home, so putting that into the 6-7 pm window both lowers temptation to do it during the business workday and pushes out an urge to keep working on work stuff late.

mellery451• 15 years ago

I would call that selfish (avoiding the kids at home, that is). Sure, there are plenty of days I'd probably just rather hole-up in my cube and code late into night, but I don't because it's more important that I be an engaged parent. It's not like my kids are going to get a do-over on childhood.

silverlake• 15 years ago

Law firms are changing. They are moving away from billable hours and towards fixed price contracts. They are making better use of non-partner track lawyers to handle routine stuff, and those lawyers get sane hours and lower salaries.

dave_sullivan2• 15 years ago

You're right, some are moving away from billable hours because they have to. However, I haven't heard much about a reduction in working hours. Lots of out of work lawyers and biglaw firms are back to offering 160k+ to summer associates--business as usual but less of it to go around. Non-partner track seems same as it's ever been, except you're less likely to have a job. I'm glad I'm not a lawyer...

rdouble• 15 years ago

Long hours are not always because of a broken process, or death march deadlines.

Many times when I have worked long hours, it was because I was really into the problem I was trying to solve, and didn't want to quit.

funkah• 15 years ago

Yes, precisely. This only applies if you were forced to work the long hours, as opposed to doing it because you felt like it.

DaveWAlbert• 15 years ago

Which is why I don't like the 9-5 nonsense either. Also programming isn't just done at the computer. When I am working on a problem, I am working on it at lunch, on the bus, on my cycle, sitting out side starring into space, etc. Left to my own devices I would "work" infront of my work pc 60 hours one week 5-10 the next 40 the next two. Being forced to be in the office a set time is no good for anyone in my position.

billswift• 15 years ago

Same here. Any time you are working a difficult problem, especially one that is difficult because of its complexity, you have to keep a lot of context in your head. In that situation, keep going as long as you can and are still making progress. This is the same problem, but in a more extreme context, as the "getting back on track" problem caused by interruptions that was discussed in Peopleware, and frequently since.

brunnsbe• 15 years ago

There was a discussion program on radio here in Finland (Eftersnack on YLE Vega) where they talked about heavy jobs and one job, along the other works job that contained physical challenge, was the job as a software engineer. They compared it to playing chess all day long; "the next move is yours and you cannot get it out of your head, you think about the move (read problem in your code/application) all day and night long". Although they went a little bit over the top with the comparison they still hit the nail.

edw519• 15 years ago

What do long hours often represent?

Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users.

Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources.

Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.

swombat6• 15 years ago

That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-)

He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management.

I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent'). If you're working regular long hours on someone else's business, it's because they are incompetent/lazy/greedy.

trb2• 15 years ago

Don't you think it's a bit unfair to call everyone who works long hours incompetent? I've seen point two that edw519 made a few times. If there's not enough work to pay for another employee, but just enough to pay for your kids college tuition if you make a lot of overtime, what should you do? Growing your business can take years before you can relax a little.

webwright3• 15 years ago

"If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent')."

Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the money. But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted to) the game they are playing.

Whoever you're competing with, you've probably got competitors smarter than you and willing to put in long hours. If you're playing to win (many people do, for a lot of reasons), how do you propose to beat them?

To anticipate a common argument: Yes, working hard can lead to stress/bad decisions/burnout. But empirically, it seems to correlate pretty strongly with success.

famousactress• 15 years ago

I think that's generally true, but let's accept that startups aren't businesses. They're potential businesses. I suppose they fall into the 'failing' category in your example, except that's not very fair.. they haven't had much of a shot yet.

Until something gets off the ground, I wouldn't say working long hours doesn't make you lazy, greedy, incompetent or stupid. That said, it can certainly be counter-productive if done for too long.

silverbax88• 15 years ago

100% agree. Long hours once in a while is just part of the dynamic nature of life. A job where the hours are consistently longer is ALWAYS a sign of bad management. Always.

yrislerlhf• 15 years ago

Relationship: Being in love.

Personal Project: Mental illness.

Family: Organized crime.

Farm: Harvest time.

Anime: Watching Neon Genesis Evangelion.

keithnoizu2• 15 years ago

I think it's important that these long hours are the exception and not the rule. You do hit a burnout point eventually and this can be devastating for a start-up where you need your best and brightest being exactly that and coming up with new and better solutions to existing problems that will help put you ahead of the current and future competition.

MisterMerkin• 15 years ago

Question, what do the long hours that are part of investment banking fall under. I haven't worked in it but might yet so I'm curious. I know there's a lot to do in a short amount of time in terms of the mood of the stock market like a small business, but c'mon, these are smart people, surely they can streamline some of these processes.

nostrademons4• 15 years ago

From my conversations with I-banker friends, it sounds like the long hours in I-banking are externally imposed. When a client is facing an imminent acquisition deal, it's very important that they get all their accounting straightened out, all their valuations nailed down while the acquirer is still interested. A delay usually means the deal falls through.

So when companies come to an I-banking firm, they're usually like "I need all your best people on this, stat." And because there're millions of dollars at stake, the I-banking firm will happily comply.

So I-bankers definitely fall into the "working late because of somebody else's incompetence" camp. In this case, it's customers. There're various things that startups could do that would make I-banker's jobs a lot easier: keep good accounting records, make sure they're completely covered legally, have solid revenue streams, don't get all buddy-buddy with potential acquirers. But startups that do all this rarely need an I-banker to close the deal; they just negotiate directly with a potential acquirer, have the lawyers draw up a deal, and sign it.

Basically, the I-banking business model is trading other people's stupidity for cash. It's the same thing with management consultants, and divorce attorneys, and litigators, all also professions that can make a lot of money but have shitty quality of life.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

This is the fallacy of long hours. You spend so many hours at work every day and every once in a while you have some late night inspiration or collaborative breakthrough or take advantage of some other opportunity, and then like any gambling addict you associate working long hours with the rewards. You ignore all the costs (stress, family strain, sleep deprivation, lower productivity, higher defect rates, etc.) It's classic confirmation bias.

Add to that the machismo notions that working long hours is working "harder" than otherwise and that working fewer hours shows less commitment and less strength. In reality it takes more focus, more smarts, and more discipline to work shorter hours effectively (sure, you can slack off by working fewer hours, but you can also slack off by working more hours too)

rokhayakebe2• 15 years ago

To start with working 40 hours in itself is probably too much. I do not have studies to back this up, but I think after 5 working hours it is best you stop for the day.

ptman• 15 years ago

I have this vague recollection of reading a study that claimed people in research and development should be working around 25 hours per week for best productivity. And I've never been able to find that study after that =( I think it was German. I keep wondering if I dreamed about it...

d0m• 15 years ago

"Any time you have worked long hours it is a sign of a broken process." Or extreme pleasure hacking something.

terhechte• 15 years ago

If I'd count all the over hours that I did for my current company over the years, I think it would be the equivalent of one year of work. And yes, most of that wasn't necessary but bad planning and a fraked up process.

Duff2• 15 years ago

The amusing thing to me is that the question was closed as offtopic. Stackexchange is slowly turning into a Usenet/Wikipedia hybrid.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

All of the best StackExchange questions are the ones that are closed for being too chatty.

chrisbennet• 15 years ago

Um, that's what is supposed to be. It is not a chat room. It's a place to get answers (or give them).

"All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not just imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions."

Duff2• 15 years ago

The top voted, open question on that particular SE site is "What should a developer know before building a public web site?"

I'm a huge fan of SE, I just find the random prickyness of shutting stuff down without editing annoying.

robryan4• 15 years ago

I think they miss out on an opportunity there, just tag them differently or put them in a different section or something. The question and answer stuff is great for searching but when you have put together such a knowledgeable community it seems like a waste not to allow them to engage on topics like this.

jgilliam• 15 years ago

Ah, so this is why it takes LinkedIn forever to add new features.

bomatson• 15 years ago

touché.

mentat• 15 years ago

No, that is why it takes a long time to add <random obscure feature that doesn't have business value>.

warmfuzzykitten• 15 years ago

Process schmoces. Any time I work long hours it's a sign I want to work long hours. Sometimes you're hot and you just don't want to stop.

Androsynth2• 15 years ago

I'm like this also, but would you be hot for 60 hours a week for a year? I think the op is referring to extending time periods.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

How about in a cyclical project start -> project release process?

I am not referring to "crunch time" where you realize everything is broken and your schedule was unrealistic; rather, many projects I have participated in have an escalating work load as you near release, because a lot of the work simply cannot be done before previous stages are completed.

Unless you are a large entity that can heavily "pipeline" by running 10 or 20 projects at once, and shuffle people around as a project's workload changes, to avoid ever working overtime you'd need to either have to hire too many employees, or hire/fire regularly. Not entirely dissimilar to trying to balance a server cluster with load spikes.

danielharan• 15 years ago

Work that can't be done because of dependencies, long release cycles instead of incremental delivery, planned escalating work load...

What part of that do you think is NOT broken?

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

It may not be the romantic ideal, but I don't see the fix. Try as you might, some work has dependency trees.

About all I can think of is over-hiring, or release cycles could be extended, but for us TTM is pretty sensitive.

Androsynth2• 15 years ago

My biggest problem with long hours (aside from the long hours themselves), is that like most programmers, I'm not constantly productive for 10 hours a day. It frustrates me that I have to sit in my desk for long periods where I'm unproductive before my muse hits and then I enter hugely productive periods (which often take place outside of normal business hours).

I don't think some m-f, 9-5 union type situation is the proper answer, but theres gotta be a better way. Sitting at my desk when I'm not being productive is a waste of my life.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Work somewhere else? It's 3pm and I'm just now ready to head in to the office.

felipemnoa6• 15 years ago

Used to do this all the time at my old job. There were so many distractions during the day that I would just come in late and code all by myself. It was awesome.

KeyBoardG• 15 years ago

Just because LinkedIn was a success does not mean a blanket statement can be made for all. I would have titled it "All too often". Too many outside factors can have an impact. I would use Wordpress for the example of working long hours and also being a success.

ctdonath• 15 years ago

One comment mentioned "Fizz-Buzz" which I hadn't heard of. Interesting tidbit. http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev...

hugh32• 15 years ago

That confused me. Am I overlooking something that makes the problem non-trivial?

On further reading I'm pretty sure I'm not, but perhaps the very triviality of the problem confuses people enough that they have difficulty with it. ("Is there some weird edge case I'm not considering?")

The other big question with FizzBuzz is whether it's worth making your code more complicated in order to make it slightly shorter. That is, do you start off with a "if i % 15 == 0" or not? My inclination is yes, because I'd rather have ten lines that obviously work than eight lines that might not.

three14• 15 years ago

I interviewed someone, and following a hunch, asked him to write FizzBuzz, and he couldn't do it within a half hour. He wasn't overthinking it; he just couldn't decompose the problem.

akeefer• 15 years ago

One thing my company has done since way back in its startup days (we're pretty successful at this point) is put an emphasis on working reasonable hours, and it's been successful for us. Some people still choose to work long hours because they're excited about what they're working on, but it's not expected or asked of anyone. There were two reasons for doing that even as a startup, and I think they're both still valid.

Reason #1 is that working long hours often becomes an excuse to not prioritize properly. Working under realistic constraints forces you to really decide whether some feature is worth it, or if spending 40 hours on Feature A is better than spending 40 hours in Features B, C, and D combined. Too often the answer at companies is, "Well, A, B, C, and D are all really important, so just work harder and do everything." That's a very seductive trap to fall into, but it's absolutely the wrong escape valve. At least in my view a failure to focus and prioritize properly is far more often a cause of failure for startups than "we didn't work hard enough."

Reason #2 is that you want to avoid burning people out if you expect to be around for the long haul. Our company just turned 10, and we still have a surprising number of long-tenured engineers, which I'd attribute in large part to the work environment and the relative sanity of the work/life balance people can have. If you expect people to work 60+ hours a week every week, they're not going to stick around for 10 years; they're going to get burned out and bored and they'll feel like the only way to get a break is to quit.

You can quibble with the second reason, but I think that even in a situation where you feel like you have to get a ton done and working 40 hours a week isn't an option, it's very important not to use "we'll just work harder" as an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions around priorities.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

The punch line is that this is how LinkedIn grew, however I know for a fact that the operations guys put in some odd hours :-)

That being said, its symptomatic. I've been places where the hours were modest and lots got done, and places where the hours were insane and nothing got done.

So the title (and the point the OP makes) don't really hold up. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if you can't get done what you need to get done during nominal work hourse, then one possibility is that your process is broken. Of course that isn't as impactful :-)

AlexC04• 15 years ago

Honestly I think the real answer is "if you're asking that question, it's time to find a new job"

I've been through this very same ringer recently and strongly believe that changing from within is far more trouble, far more stressful and far more difficult than the effort is worth.

If you've got so many options, leave.

I've very happy in my new role and it took getting out of the old one to fix it.

mcculley• 15 years ago

Certainly, if you work on an assembly line. If you work in some industry where you have to come up with solutions to problems, the workload may be more lumpy because nobody has figured out how to build a production line for it yet.

patternpaul• 15 years ago

I am surprised no one has quoted something from Steve Blank http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur... "Work Smarter Not Harder As I got older I began to realize that how effective you are is not necessarily correlated with how many hours you work. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. I began to think how to be effective and strategic rather than just present and tactical."

forgotAgain• 15 years ago

Goldratt saw this 30 years ago. No one has done a better job explaining why this is true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt

jowiar• 15 years ago

The broken process may not be company-specific. We are in an industry that is driven not just by getting things to market, but by getting things to market faster than the other guy. As we all know, software does not really scale too well to adding people to the problem. Thus, being to market faster is often achieved by coaxing more work out of the same number of people, this results in long hours.

Thought experiment: Imagine some sort of truce declared among startups to skip this part of the arms race. Or, imagine a law passed capping work weeks for software engineers at 50 hours, no exceptions (again, the reason this happening by law would be to eliminate the arms race). What would it do?

barnaby• 15 years ago

That's a good thought experiment. I imagine we would very suddenly see an explosion of automation solutions for making engineers accomplish more with less time. We would also see an almost perfect eradication of most time-sinks in software development.

thomasgerbe• 15 years ago

"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

I hate absolute statements like these. Some of my best works have come from working long hours voluntarily.

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

Any time you have worked long hours it is a sign of a broken process.

--------------------------

I see the point they're trying to make, but this is the problem with speaking in absolutes ...

My personal preference (and I suspect other developers do this too, but I could be very wrong about that) is to work when I'm in the zone ... sometimes I can go for 8 hours, others I can go 24 hours straight without any trouble (other times I don't get anything done for a couple of days) ... during projects when I'm knee deep in building something, its not uncommon for me to do 10 - 14 hour days ... not because its expected of me, but because that's how I work.

As long your employer isn't forcing you to do death marches/ insisting you work on weekends and you're getting good rest, exercise and eating well, I don't see a problem.

DavidSJ• 15 years ago

Or it's a sign that you love your job.

rick888• 15 years ago

I've seen this at companies where the boss or manager either doesn't understand the development process or just wants to make money and doesn't care. So you have situations where a feature should take 2 weeks to implement, but they want it in a week (so you need to work extra hours to make up for it).

This is one of the reasons I hate working for other people. If I'm going to be wasting my youth away for something, I'm going to be getting all or the majority of the profits.

gxs• 15 years ago

I don't know - and I absolutely loathe statements like these.

Sometimes, I prefer to work 18 hours in one day and enjoy 2 days free, rather than 9 to 5 it for 3-4 days. At this point, you're insulting my personal preferences, not my process.

FrancescoRizzi• 15 years ago

Indeed: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure." (J. Fried of 37signals, from http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2185-a-new-way-of-working-a-t... )

lwat• 15 years ago

One of our most successful clients (grew from nothing to 200+ employees in 5 years) has always had a very strict 6pm closing time. Everyone must be out of the building at 6pm and there's no 'working from home' or 'work on the weekend' allowed.

robryan4• 15 years ago

I'm sure this cut people off in the zone when 6pm hit from time to time. As others have said here I think that the best is a happy medium, no enforced long hours but no enforced breaks either.

felipemnoa6• 15 years ago

<rant> What a bunch of B.S. In fact I cannot believe it is even here in Hacker News.

"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

This is a such a horrible generalization. Successful people always work hard/long hours to make something succeed. Imagine telling your kids that to be successful you should work just 40 hours and no more. They will be easily steamed rolled by other kids that are willing to work harder/ go the extra mile.

Here is a relevant piece from: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

>>Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!<<

>>What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.<<

Yes, sometimes it may mean that working long hours there is something wrong and the title should reflect that rather than just generalizing.

I remember there was a study done at one point that the best piano players had worked longer hours per week practicing as opposed to the so so piano player.

You want to work 40 hours and be happy? Good! But I doubt you will be able to achieve greatness like that. Achieving success requires sacrifices.

Edison is another example of a guy that would work really long hours. Look at everything that he accomplished. You want to be mediocre, work 40 hours. You want to be great like Edison, work your ass off. Don't listen to the little people that tell you not to work your ass off. That is the road to mediocrity.

Now, if you are saying that you want to have time for family and be another cog in the machine, 40 hours are great for you. </rant>

edit - OK, after further reflection I think that what the title means is that IF you are just a cog in the machine of a large corporation AND you are working long hours then something is terribly wrong. If that was the original intent then I completely agree. Is OK to do it once in a while but if it is normal then something is terribly wrong.

Now, for academics, athletics, other competitive fields and even startups at least in their earlier faces you still have to work long hours or the other guys will steam roll you. Eventually though you do hit a point of diminishing returns so you have to watch for that.

rjd2• 15 years ago

So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I doubt you should ever use Edison or Einstein to ever refer to the average person. Let alone put yourself in the same camp, you'll probably do yourself mental harm via exhaustion. Fine if you have abnormal drive and intelligence go for it.

But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy. Or you won't be happy. Maybe you'll throw yourself at your work in the hope of finding happiness.. something I'll admit to doing myself.. chasing dreams of a better life.

Theres plenty of research that states the exact opposite of what you are saying, enough that France even had laws banning working over 35 hours (and its 48 hours for the rest of Europe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Western_Europe

What works for some people doesn't work for others. I remember listening to my friend talk about working in Japan during the late 80's early 90's and described the people he worked with as having an ingrained apathy towards the long work day, and most just mucked around all day. Took 2 hours to even start work, the work force was extremely unproductive for the hours they where doing. I'm sure theres different stories in different industries but thats a story I take as 100% as the person isn't known for being a liar or exaggerator.

Just because you can make people work long hours doesn't mean things get better, it often means things get worse. And thats the moral of his story about Japan.

The stories of how industrious and loyal they are... just stories... they are just people like everyone else. And as a majority they'd rather be at home with there families and friends than at work making someone else rich.

felipemnoa6• 15 years ago

>>So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I could show you many more but why?

>>But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy

Yes, do what makes you happy and yes I am an average person but that doesn't mean that I cannot tell you that the sky is blue even if I were blind (I think you know what I mean). What I disliked is the blanket statement. In very competitive fields if you want to be top dog you have to work long hours and even that may not be enough. Of course, if you work on a sweatshop working long hours really makes no difference. Top dog against who? Lets just not make blanket statements.

Some people are happy working 40 hours others are happy working 80 hours. And if you are in a competitive field 40 hours will not do the job. Happiness is besides the point. If that doesn't make you happy don't do it. I'm not telling anybody to work 80 hours to be happy. I'm telling you not to try to convince other people that they should not work 80 hours a week because you don't like to work 80 hours a week.

I'm saying that if you want to stay ahead of your peers, say, athletics, academics, you better train more, study harder than the other guy. Is almost a self evident truth so I don't understand what we are arguing about. If I'm wrong please enlighten me.

mattm13• 15 years ago

I'm in Japan now and Japan is still like this. Actually, a lot of SE Asia is like this - Korea, HK. When I talk to people about this they even admit it. They realise they are goofing off a lot of the day because they know they have to stay late so there is little incentive to be productive.

I believe that people can only work productively for a set amount per day and keeping people at work after that doesn't lead to any more work being done.

killerswan2• 15 years ago

Accomplishment is nice, but there's a lot more to it than simply working hours. A consistent thing: long hours without consideration of whether you could do even better with a change in process are always a mistake.

If you're doing the work in a situation where adding staff or changing commitments really will not help you, by all means, continue to work, and find whatever tricks you need to stay focused in that time.

Edison had a whole company helping him do his work, and I bet the best of piano players have a cleaning lady, a chauffeur, and a specialist in tuning pianos all helping them to spend more time mentally preparing (including via sleep) and with hands on keys.

felipemnoa6• 15 years ago

If yo want to work 9 to 5 that is fine. Is your choice. But I think is unfair to claim that working 9 to 5 will increase your chances of success. Now, whether you don't care for that is another matter. Fine with me if you are happy. Working long hours in a sweat shop is bad obviously. Working long hours practicing in athletics, music, academics is necessary. If you don't do it somebody else will. Assuming you want to reach the top else why even discuss it.

mattm13• 15 years ago

Edison was famous for bragging that he only needed 2-3 hours sleep a night. Then when Tesla came to work with him he once remarked to a reporter "Yes, he only sleeps 2-3 hours a night but he naps for 5-6 hours during the day."

kamaal3• 15 years ago

Edison Vs Tesla debates often end up going no where, this is because the debates take the nature of debate between two school of thoughts. One which believes that learning the body of knowledge and using proper academic approach to research is the right way to success(Tesla), other approach is to take a interesting problem without having no background and prior knowledge of what you are going into, but as you go deeper you begin learn and do things by experimenting on the way(Edison).

Edison approach takes time, a lot of work and thereby you need to find ways of being more productive. Both methods have their plus'es and minus'es.

But.. If you find some body very hardworking, going over the counter to put effort in his work to achieve something and he ends up being more successfully than everybody else. That shouldn't look surprising. And that precisely what happened with Edison and Tesla.

Although Edison lost the war of currents, but comparing their lives as a whole Edison ended up achieving far more than Tesla.

MortenK• 15 years ago

You shouldn't counter one "horrible generalization" with another, such as "Successful people always work hard/long hours to make something succeed."

felipemnoa6• 15 years ago

True, I should have said most of the time.

jhdavids82• 15 years ago

One of the worst articles I've ever seen posted on HN. I'm not going to even read through the comments, but I hope most are simply stating that this is complete BS. Otherwise, you're arguing simply for the sake of arguing. Not everything should be argued, not everything should be over-analyzed. Working long hours is often a choice; you do it to get ahead, you do it to improve your product, you do it for any number of reasons (and yes, maybe you do it because something is broken). Any argument to the contrary supporting this stupid argument is simply BS.

jhdavids82• 15 years ago

"This one time, at one job I had, I was able to work 9-5 Monday-Friday. The company I worked for was successful. Therefore, ANY job that requires extra hours is the sign of a broken process."

Why would anyone hire a dude like this with such poor reasoning skills?

biznickman• 15 years ago

So says employee #178 .... I'm being sarcastic, but I doubt employee #1 @ LinkedIn would tell you they worked 9-5

phatbyte• 15 years ago

I'm lucky, I can't remember doing overnight or weekends, but for the first time we will have to do, but I'll get paid 50% of my salary for two extra working weekends.

It really confuses to see kids with red bulls typing code all day and night. I mean, how can you think clear and be productive that way ?

You may do more, but do you do it better and deliver quality code ?

benaston• 15 years ago

>> It really confuses to see kids with red bulls typing code all day and night

Those kids are learning and will probably make a success of what they are doing. The payoff comes later.

known• 15 years ago

Not applicable if you're debugging code

hm2k• 15 years ago

Maybe you're working long hours to fix the process?

That's the only reason I work long hours.

"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

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