Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/stop-working-more-than-40-hours-a-week.html

by MarlonPro • 14 years ago

84 26 14 years ago

plg• 14 years ago

makes total sense. why work > 40 hrs per week if you're already making an annual salary of $30,491,613 (2011, Wikipedia)... $14,659 per hr assuming 52 weeks x 40 hrs/week.

greenyoda• 14 years ago

I'd be curious to know whether Sheryl Sandberg's staff are also allowed to leave at 5:30. Or is this just a privilege available to a senior executive, which she might never even consider granting to her underlings? I'd be more impressed to hear that software developers at Facebook could work the same hours. Anyone at Facebook have any insights on this?

nbm2• 14 years ago

I don't know about staff closer to Sheryl (ie, not in e), but there are definitely many software and other engineers working 40-45 hours a week fairly standardly, and I seemingly don't hear enough negative chatter about it for me to recall hearing any.

zht• 14 years ago

If only Facebook allowed their employees to work only 40 hours a week instead of forcing them to work nights and weekends during lock down periods.

She seems extremely out of touch with the workload for Facebook engineers.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/06/facebook-lockdown-google-m...

alexgartrell• 14 years ago

I work at Facebook, do not work very many hours (9:30-5:30 most days, including breakfast, lunch and sometimes an hour-long workout at the gym), and have never heard so much as a suggestion that I work more. This was also true during lockdown. The truth is, if you are capable of getting a lot of shit done, people are just happy that you're able to give them a lot, they don't squeeze every productive second out of you.

I attribute the 24/7 lockdown stuff to people who wear it as a badge of honor (that's exactly how Carnegie Mellon was, at least).

nbm2• 14 years ago

People aren't forced to work nights and weekends during lockdown, although some teams may up their expectations for people to do that. I haven't been on a high-priority project for a lockdown, but I imagine it is possible that some go overboard. I also imagine it is likely that the guys who have good reasons to not stay late or work weekends also teach the guys that go overboard a thing or two much of the time. Working a few nights and weekends for a known short period of time is different from a death march, making it a habit, or having a culture that expects it all the time. Much like I imagine Sheryl does a few late nights in a row and an impacted weekend every once in a while to overcome some time-sensitive hurdles to the company's success.

The message is that the company is going to make it easy to work on and focus on the particular high-priority projects you are involved in by increasing the rate and operating hours for shuttles and kitchens, and making it even more culturally acceptable (and even dutiful) to avoid distractions like meetings, lower-priority projects, and so forth. Obstacles to getting work done, whether during usual office hours (which are already not that usual) or not, are reduced or removed.

For me, the lockdown concept gave me an opportunity to consider working on more important things than the things that just happened to be in my tasks list, my appointment calendar, what people in team meetings thought was important, and so forth. Lower-value meetings started happening less frequently or being indefinitely postponed. In terms of time, I think I ended up working less at the end of lockdown than I did before it started.

rollypolly• 14 years ago

  In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the
  world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark,
  and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more
  than a 48-hour work week.

The fact that it's illegal doesn't mean it's not happening.

njs123452• 14 years ago

It's certainly not illegal in the UK if the employee signs a waiver when hired: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHour... (see "Opting out of the 48 hour week")

bmj• 14 years ago

Is this typical for, say, the software industry there? I wonder if it's the equivalent of non-competes and intellectual property agreements here: ubiquitous enough that most people don't even blink when they are part of an employment contract.

asmala• 14 years ago

As an entrepreneur/freelancer, I don't have a lot of firsthand experience with Finnish labor laws, but my impression is that in practice such limitations apply mostly to manual laborers in bigger corporations.

Going by the book, the labor laws also allow for paid overtime (up to 2x salary), but that is limited no more 138h per 4 month period, or approximately 8h per week. And even then the employee can decline.

But that's if we go by the book...

Many of my friends working in specialist jobs across various industries regularly work overtime, often without compensation. I guess they could technically decline but if your plan is career progression that might not be a smart move outside unionized workforces.

Atropos• 14 years ago

Yeah the law really doesn't mean alot. I know for a fact that the usual suspects like bankers, lawyers, middle management work crazy hours like everywhere else. There was actually a high court decision not long ago, where a lawyer demanded overtime pay for a few years of 60-70 hour workweek. But since his base pay was around 7000€ / month the court decided he shouldnt get anything, all hours are included in the salary - which is of course a totally reasonable and expected decision, but it shows that the 40 hour limit isnt too meaningful.

bishnu• 14 years ago

Sheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30; she doesn't stop working at 5:30 [1]. In that same article it goes to great lengths to talk about how late she stays up working and how early she would start to ensure people didn't think she was a slacker.

[1] http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/facebook-sheryl-sandberg...

rkudeshi• 14 years ago

I believe that was in reference to what she USED to do, to avoid the slacker stigma. Now she works less hours, proudly.

overshard• 14 years ago

What bothers me is that it matters how long someone works in a week. If you are getting payed for a 40 hour work week then you should only work 40 hours a week. If you are getting paid hourly (as I do) who cares as long as stuff is getting done. Some weeks I work 20 hours, some I work 60 it just depends on my workload and mood.

If you want to work 40 hours a week and be done then go for it, good for you. If you want to work 60 hours a week, also good for you. The problem comes with you start judging other people by how long they work, just because someone goes home at 5 every day doesn't mean they don't care about their jobs...

w0utert• 14 years ago

^ this

Hours worked must be one of the worst metrics for performance, productivity, efficiency or commitment. I don't know why people in some countries or cultures are so obsessed with how long they work, or how few days they take off. Or actually, maybe I do know why, but it has nothing to do with 'amount of work done' or 'quality of work'.

I think that more often than not, the people consistently putting in the most hours are those who take the longest to finish stuff, and care the least about the quality of their output. Anyone can sit behind a desk 10 hours a day to impress the boss.

IMO no metric used to assess performance or productivity should include the number of hours present in the office. Instead of 'hours worked this week' or 'number of days worked this year', the metric should be 'total number of hours to finish the job', preferably divided by a factor based on the 'amount of rework or support required afterwards' and/or multiplied by a factor based on the flexibility of the person doing the work, both in terms of availability as well as skill set. Of course some of these things are hard to track on a spreadsheet, so they are rarely used.

Long story short: just try to do the best job you can in the most efficient way possible, without turning into a bean counter, just because that's the best way to impress your superior.

MarlonPro• 14 years ago

Great point! Getting things done in 40 or less hours a week is a great feat. Now, "being busy" for more than that amount of hours is not.

kennu• 14 years ago

I am confused when people even consider measuring productivity with hours spent. It's like trying to measure the brightness of a lightbulb with the amount of time it's been turned on - two totally different quantities.

Usually productivity can only be estimated by your boss, who measures it with your salary, which can be converted to $/h or EUR/h. The work you get done is then logically measured by hours * salary. That's what it's worth to the company, anyway.

wpietri2• 14 years ago

I agree in part.

I strongly approve of people who go home on time. But I'm very suspicious of developers who consistently work a lot of hours. Working tired is like working drunk: your judgment is one of the first things to go.

That matters less to me in other fields. But software development is all about good judgment. And version control preserves every late-night mistake until a well-rested person cleans is up later.

temphn• 14 years ago

Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook:

  http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130

  This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. 
  But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did 
  something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding 
  nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.

Lessons from Yishan Wong, Director of Engineering at Facebook:

  http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-determine-if-you-are-ready-to-join-a-startup

  Working at a startup doesn't necessarily mean long hours, 
  but it does mean that it's not the hours that count, it's 
  the results.  If you need to work 80 hours to get 
  something done by next week, you will need to do it 
  because otherwise the startup might die - in a large 
  company, this might just result in some mild consequences.  
  Startup life tends to go in bursts.  You should be 
  comfortable with this.

Had Mark Zuckerberg left at 5pm in the middle of the news feed crunch, the company probably would have died before it was able to pay Sheryl Sandberg so much money to work 40 hours a week. Instead they coded 48 hours straight.

j_baker• 14 years ago

Well that was certainly nice of him. Did you have any evidence that Sandberg's strategy is wrong for her or even the majority of people in the tech industry, or were you under the impression that an anecdote from a completely unrelated incident years before would actually prove something?

wpietri2• 14 years ago

I believe the difference is "normal" versus "emergency". My startup aims for a sane work-week, but if something caught on fire I would be there until the fire was put out.

As long as that happens rarely, it's not a problem. And you keep it that way by carefully analyzing each fire and making sure that you solve the root causes.

mea36• 14 years ago

As a woman in a start up and indeed generally as a member of a start up, I find this recent uproar about Sheryl Sandberg quite frustrating.

I'll admit that I didn't watch the interview that she just did. However, I did see her speak this past year at the Grace Hopper Conference. Yes, she goes home at 5.30 to eat with her kids, but in this digital age it doesn't mean she is done with work. She just uses technology to timeshift and work when it best fits into her life. She goes home so she can be with her kids while they are awake but she's still responding to emails and does work after her kids are asleep. This is the beauty of digital age.

While I don't have kids, or a even significant other, I do, however, have a personal life that I refuse to sacrifice because I am in a start up. I'm sure many of you feel the same; this means I do work, I go out with my friends, come home and do more work. Maybe I wake up earlier then everyone else, work on weekends, etc. This is no different than what Sandberg does.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

Be productive, ignore the haters, do your thing.

Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

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