The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted at the maximum rate allowed by our organization.
My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion.
My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job.
Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.
Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER.
People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them.
No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the even point of a stupid, unfair one.
Also - you need to just plain not take jobs in companies with hustle cultures if you can avoid it. If everyone on the team is 22, it's probably going to be hell, because they are still to learn the lesson the hard way.
Call it reverse agism or whatever, but it's a joy to work with professionals who have seen dysfunctional workplaces and who have lives.
> Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER.
So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?
People regularly walk in from the street just in time for that 10:30 standup.
Then it's 11, then they get ready for the day, then it's lunch time. Then it's lunch coma. Then by 3PM they start gaining speed. By that time, I am already exhausted.
To be fair some people have naturally different "peak hours" and sleep schedules. I naturally fall asleep around 1-2AM and wake up at 10. Going to bed earlier involves tossing and turning for hours annoying the SO. Staying up for 36 hours to "reset" works for a couple nights before the schedule drifts back to its natural state.
I practice sleep hygiene and have tried cutting out caffeine. Conversely, there's no amount of caffeine capable of facilitating deep work before 10:30-11AM, just end up frantically clicking around articles and wishing for sleep.
Maybe these people aren't trying to game the optics, they just are naturally at their most productive from 11-7. IMHO it's awesome that your company allows that kind of flexibility (and that the morning startup is at 10:30!)
Is “peak hours” a studied phenomenon? I have always assumed it is lifestyle habits and circadian rhythm/inertia. My experience with jet lag makes me think it is the latter.
If I get in at 11 it usually means I’ve already done stuff at home, probably between 8 and 10. Getting in late doesn’t mean that they’re starting late.
People are different. I’m not a morning person and struggling through the first half of the day. Right after a lunch is when my most productive hours start.
11am is the best start time for me if I have to be on a set schedule. 10am being my wake up time. These aren't ideal personally but it is a workable compromise. Although I'd rather not have to compromise on my sleep at all.
Yeah I'm weirded out by that as well. On our platform engineering team, the "early rising" crew is usually up and working at 7 - 7:30. Some guy needed the afternoon hours for personal reasons and started working at like 6:30 for two or three months.
Personally I like to start working around 8, so I can triage the monitoring while the brain runs through the last boot processes and unit activations so I can use those (for me) very productive hours between 9 and 12.
In every tech workplace I've been, 9am start time is the early risers, and 10:30-11am is when people actually 'are online'. Maybe it's different in the consulting space.
I often treasure the ~7:30-9:30 chunk of my day when WFH because of this tendency. It's basically guaranteed focus time and always feels a pity to lose it commuting on the days I go to the office
> I’m usually ready to go full speed by 8AM, I wfh and kids are out the door to school by 7:35-7:40Am.
With somewhat younger kids (preschool), they too are out the door by 07:35-07:40, but it's me who's walking them to their facilities, which means there's no way I could possibly start working before 09:00, or before 09:30 if I don't want to start on an empty stomach.
Not really. Sometimes the option not to play is not there. It's like romantic dating - you can complain all you want about how women do not see the "real" you, but if you don't take part in the dumb ritual and the vanity of it all, you will always lose to someone who plays the game.
That part I said about us being shallow and easily giving into the optics? This is not going to change, as trying to change deeply basic human nature is a fool's errand.
Fully agree. On my last job interview, I sat in front of the committee (about 7 to-be colleagues) and the director. I said:
> I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money.
Everyone smiled. Except the director.
I still got the position, but the director is still hoping I will at some time upgrade to 100%. I said I will consider again after 2 years, but I doubt my perception will have changed by that time.
To be honest, I don't know if I would have said that. I think that employees in "creative" positions (e.g., you're not serving customers at a bar and need to keep the shop open and working) are paid based on the output they produce. Whether that output is produced in 2, 6 or 8 hours is not really their problem. Looking at it this way, they would have happily paid you 100% of your salary for the same output you're now giving them with a 20% discount.
I work in academia and this was a tenure track position - these are quite rare and I have the feeling that only those will get these positions that can work 100% in 50% of time anyway (which accounts to 200% of work in a regular 40-hour job). I just wanted to make absolutely sure that I will have a limit of 6 hours a day and can take care of my body afterwards. Sitting 8 hours is just not doable anymore at close to 40, at least not for me.
When I started my new job a month ago I told the founder that generally I've worked 25-30 hour weeks. My references were good enough that he said "Well if that's what it took to make your references that happy go right ahead and continue working those hours".
Reasonable people understand that hours != output.
> The rest of my [5] working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc.
That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email.
Granted, a lot of my day is spent on our internal chat tool (Slack equivalent), so I suppose that’s mostly equivalent to meetings/email. But I would consider that time mostly productive, and certainly don’t feel like it consumes 5 hours of my 8-hour day.
But I do agree with the last two paragraphs (and the general sentiment that a culture of overtime is never good), and to your point, if what you describe feels productive to you, that’s what’s important.
> That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email.
I hated every minute outside of the three hours of actual work I did every day, but I did it because I felt I had to maintain the appearance of being productive.
The simple reality is that after those three hours of intensive work I didn't have any mental juice left to do useful stuff. At that point in my career I would have given more if I had it, but I just didn't have the mental stamina for that level of focused work.
What I wondered during those years is: if I'm "slacking" most of the day, how can I be a top contributor? But I was, and not because I was particularly smart or good at selling myself. I suspect the answer is simply that most people don't actually work all that many hours a day either, either intentionally or because in order to go through the whole 8-hour workday they pace themselves accordingly.
A strategy I've used since covid is to go into the office in the morning for my focus work. My mind works best then and I can also satisfy our current requirements for being at the office some of the time. Then I go home at noon, or 1 if I had some momentum on something. Then the afternoon is spent in the mindless teams/zoom/etc meetings and emailing. It's a pretty productive arrangement for me. Though it does break down when people insist on morning meetings. Then I get nothing done.
Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company.
1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time.
2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into.
4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team.
5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or "hop on for a quick check". Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer.
If you're finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.
I disagree with some of this. I think if you work with international teams, half of the time of day stuff is in play no matter what. But in general I sort of agree that we should all try to work slower/work fewer hours, for the good of society. But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more, or those who might need more breaks or work most optimally at a slower pace. We should care about workers collectively and individually, I think.
We shouldn't.harras people. But working extra is working to build a machine that HAS to be worked extra. You are solidifying the fact that work CAN'T get done in the normal hours. And then when the company goes to replace that person they will have to pay extra to get the same thing.
Even if you forget the workers. It's not good for the company.
If you want to be selfish, no judgement, sometimes you gotta do that, but don't be confused about the fact that externally it does harm.
If you have international teams, they shouldn't be working on the same project, if it can be avoided. Having teams with different working hours work the same project sabotages communications.
I have to disagree vigorously based on my current experience. My team, working on a single project/product, is globally distributed. There are team members in APAC (New Zealand), Europe, and America, and (IMO) we do very well at communicating and producing solid results.
It does take specific effort, mainly expressed in written communications in tickets/issues and other more ephemeral channels (Slack in our case). You have to think carefully about what information must be shared and how to do so. You can't just drop a random comment and hope for a good interpretation. There needs to be a "call to action": a question, a request for specific activity/response, or a suggestion (or several) for possible next steps. There also needs to be trust built between team members, which takes time and similar effort.
But when this is unlocked to its fullest potential it becomes an absolute super-power. The problem you were facing when you finished the day? Fixed by your team-mates when you start the next day, some more progress (hopefully), and they hand back the next problem to solve. Apparent velocity goes through the roof and personally I find it incredibly satisfying.
Mind you, this is all coming from an all remote/all async company. I can potentially see problems if you had two part-teams in separate time-zone separated offices with minimal overlap. Then you'd potentially run into the usual human tribalism and culture drift, and communications aren't necessarily going to solve that.
At large companies, it's unavoidable to a certain degree. In my case, it's mostly East Coast to Europe though which is pretty manageable. Asia to US is definitely tough. You're either going to have people on late-night calls or getting up in the middle of the night. It works for the odd sync but is tough on a regular basis.
> Having teams with different working hours work the same project sabotages communications.
Not really, but you have to become good at written communication. Which has a lot of benefits beyond the immediate one.
In companies where everything happens by people huddling together real-time, the result is (nearly always) that nothing is documented, which leads to disaster longer term.
I've loved working on projects where the team is globally distributed so that there is activity 24hrs and you work with people with zero overlap on working hours.
Instead of relying on ephemeral hallway conversations, you need to build a culture of updating tickets with informative content, documenting plans, and so on. This fill the immediate need of daily communication but more importantly now you have everything documented and a paper trail of every decision and bug fix which is incredibly valuable.
> But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more
I mean, sure, we shouldn't harass anyone.
But if they're working 12 hour days, and pinging me on Slack at 7pm, they're the ones harassing me. If they're producing 5 times the lines of code that I am because they're workaholics, thus causing me to spend half my day playing catch-up to their unreasonable schedule, that's also not great.
In my experience having a “rockstar” or hero programmer on your team is the surest indication of a management failure, either in velocity, priority, or hiring.
i don't see how #1 is relevant. if you have code reviews, the problem simply goes away. if my work day ends at 6pm and you check in a change at 17:50, it is really better than had you made that check-in two hours later. i'll see it in the morning and deal with it as usual.
that on-call hotfix is a completely different problem that has nothing to do with people working overtime.
Pathetic behavior I have observed in myself in the past: unconsciously opening Slack at 8am/11pm after being let go from the job and not even being able to sign in.
The reported results are more nuanced than the headline. Workers who feel pressured to work after hours estimate their own productivity as lower than workers who don't; but workers who choose to work after hours – rather than feeling pressured to do so – report slightly _higher_ productivity.
It's tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.
I work in AI research in the Bay Area where hustle culture is strong. OpenAI and hot startups have normalised working long hours and taking few vacations.
Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective. With such an aim it is easy to keep track of your progress over time and maximize your work.
But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually. With such endeavors the goal is not well defined or measurable. Pressure to be productive or have demonstrable results often leads to myopic thinking, local minima, unsustainable designs, technical debt and spaghetti code.
I haven't quite been able to capture why there exist these two modes. The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.
This is well understood in my peer group at least, and as a fractional CTO, I quite routinely find agreement with CEOs and the like on this as well. If you work hard, chances are you're not working smart enough.
I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done consciously.
Personally, I work with multiple companies and kinda found my holy grail in that: When I find myself doing questionable work in one place, I can always switch gears to something else and get back to it with some distance and fresh ideas. As an employee expected to work 40+ hours per week for a single company, that was a lot more difficult.
I wonder if being a fractional CTO self selects for knowing people who understand this? The kind of person who thinks you can go 110% all the time probably thinks you can’t work at more than one place because you owe your employer all your effort.
I think there's some truth to that. I also talk to people sceptical of the model (I'm in Germany, so scepticism is generally not in short supply), but by and large I'm most likely to meet and interact with people who believe the model works. Surely a bit of a bubble.
> But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually.
As a fellow ML researcher, I actually have a good answer to this. It's a creative task, not a labor task. Creative tasks require your brain to be exceptionally flexible and to view things from unique perspectives. Research is literally creating something that no one has thought of before so you clearly have to do things no one did before. Plus, the truth is that if you're a researcher, do you ever really "stop"? Because I'll even be sitting down playing videogames and sometimes thats when ideas come to be. Other times when I'm out for a walk. Sometimes it's also when I'm deep in the codebase tearing stuff apart because it's already 5 levels of spagetti figuring out exactly what each line does and thinking a lot about it and its connection to the rest of the program (seriously, we could do a lot more testing if we'd rewrite code from the ground up. Not doing this is like thinking your first attempt at anything is good. Idk about you, but my first attempts are absolute shit and I've learned a lot by the next go around). But all those things are connected together. Because science is very much an art. My best ideas always come from after time I've taken off which is usually long overdue (as in I can barely name 2 realistic vacations in the last 5 years), but exactly like you say, it feels like I can't take the time.
> The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.
Just me and the teams I've worked on/with or are these people also typically low productivity and not the most creative? The type of people that treat science as something you can just hammer away at like there's a clear algorithm to solving any problem. I know it's wrong, but that shit gives me mad imposter syndrome.
Like our literally job is about optimization. You think we'd be able to at least optimize a work day, or maybe a month?
> Like our literally job is about optimization. You think we'd be able to at least optimize a work day, or maybe a month?
There is lots written about this. Whole careers built on advice about it. It seems what works for some people does not work for others. My outline won't help you if you're in the valley but I'll write it out anyway, some people live elsewhere.
1/ Wake up early. Like daybreak early.
2/ Do not look at email, slack etc. No admin stuff at this point.
3/ Leisurely breakfast letting your mind wander. Historically cooked by wife, ymmv there.
4/ Spend the morning walking, thinking, writing things down. Especially write ideas down before lunch.
5/ It's midday. Optionally eat things. Open email.
6/ Entire afternoon is spent doing whatever "work" one found in the email. Put out the fires. Do the code reviews. Write whatever simple stuff seems to be required.
7/ It's evening. Try to forget the fires. Exercise helps.
8/ Spend the evening on research or socialising. Aim is to have interesting context for dreams.
9/ Sleep time.
That is relatively new to me - couple of months or so - and working really well. Note the complete lack of family activities - either that overlaps the afternoon fires or the morning creativity, or both. Opportunity cost is rough. No creative work for you if there's a toddler or an unsupportive partner present.
This morning-creative afternoon-productive split works really well if most of your colleagues are five hours west of you. They wake up in time to light things on fire. If they're five hours east, maybe swap the two blocks of time over. If they're in the same timezone and expect to talk to you all day, no creative work for you. Opportunity cost again.
> Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective
Hustle is great if you are going to make 8 figures if the startup you work at ipos. Your roi doesn't really change at big companies. might even be negative in the cases where they freeze raises (msft and others).
It's not inherently about salary but about perceiving the work as something important you really, really want to accomplish. Money is only one of the possible motivators.
I agree, its not really about salaries. Thats why people arent really motivated by the small promo structure or being rated TT/Exceeds Expectations at big companies. It's more about not being a wagie/generational wealth when the payoff happen that causes the change in behavior.
> I work in AI research in the Bay Area where hustle culture is strong.
Is it? My experience was that it was just all about optics there - 12 hours of "work" but 8 of it is coffee breaks, long lunches, nebulous and unnecessary arch design fitting in tech that makes no sense to have there but that people just wanted to play with...
Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?
I think solutions to this are more likely to come out of introspection of what you actually want in life, rather than a clever hack that gets you a high-paying programming job straight away.
Some questions that might be interesting to ask yourself:
- How much money do you actually need?
- Are there things beyond money that stop you wanting to be a junior dev (status, networks and friendships, parts of your identity)?
- Could you afford to take a year or more off work? If so, would a job where you have a junior dev salary be strictly better than that, financially?
- Are there ways you could "actually build something" that would be satisfying to you, that don't require a career jump? For example, maybe there are roles or companies in your current industry that offer better work/life balance (at the cost of some salary) and would allow you time for hobbies.
- You don't have to be a developer to work in tech. FAANG are massive companies with all sorts of employees (lawyers, doctors, investors, finance people). Are there roles at the big tech companies that would fit into your existing skill set, where you wouldn't take such a hit to salary? Would those satisfy you, or are you more concerned with changing your day-to-day work?
The obvious play is to transition to quant dev at your current place. You'll already have a bunch of software engineers who do their best to guess what the bankers are talking about. Sell your supervision structure on the idea that you work more closely with them with an eye to transitioning. That may take some salesmanship.
If you manage to cross over to quant dev you'll be able halfway to a sane working environment (it'll probably feel very relaxed to you) and at maybe half your current compensation, assuming you get somewhat lowballed while moving. Spend some time there.
You're now a professional software developer. Optionally cross over into a less mental industry to move the work/life balance curve further.
Hopefully you haven't burned everything you've made so far - investment banking is prone to a run of bad luck turning into unemployment, so if you're living paycheck to paycheck you've got an easy way to shed stress by not doing that any more.
You're making about 3x+ of a senior software engineer (sure there are exceptions but they are not the norm) so if you can hold on to that for ten years you've done a whole lifetime of software engineering income.
Making that much money I would expect that you can take almost any career risk you could imagine. I understand that you're basically millionaire at 35 years old, you're basically set for life and can focus on doing things you find more interesting, such as learning about robotics without any monetary pressure. That's a pretty luxurious and safe situation! Maybe take some time off can help you realize how insanely far ahead you are from any other worker trying to save money.
Lifestyle inflation is definitely a thing, especially with a partner and kids. You're not going back to living in a crappy apartment with non-related roommates if you have a choice. And you don't want to give up nice trips and meals out.
Stepping off a well-paid career trajectory is also hard to do even if you're pretty sure you have enough savings to comfortably cover your annual living expenses. It can be hard to get back on if things don't go as planned. I've definitely known people who ended up pushing semi-retirement out a bit because work wasn't getting in the way of life too much and why not stash some more money away while the stashing is good?
If you don't already know how to code, then it wouldn't be easy. Development isn't just another kind of job you can get trained for (unless you make very little and do things that would get outsourced). It's a skill that takes time and experience to grow into. That said, it's never "too late" for anything in life, if you find it interesting then try contributing to various github projects or even start your own.
I think software development is probably relatively easier to slide into than deciding you really want to become a mechanical or chemical engineer. As you say, it's something you can potentially do a bit on the side.
That said, per another comment, as long as the pay is ridiculously good--which odds are it won't actually be by starting over with a tech company--waiting it out and avoiding lifestyle inflation isn't the worst plan. One of my classmates in school retired from investment banking in his 40s and travels and teaches a bit on the side.
I don’t see software/tech valuing work/life balance better. It might just be that software/tech is more remote and more flexible. But tech can punish you just like investment banking.
I was asked point blank by my tech CEO: “how much do you work” - first time in my career and that’s having come from NYC finance. Don’t believe the hype!
700 on a good year is probably 400 after tax and misc breakage. Reasonable dev in cheap country is maybe 100 a year all in? Not obvious to me that any sort of "business of your dreams" can be built by two or three outsourced developers.
Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work.
Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word.
Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use.
If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers.
Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.
How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work?
He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.
Im looking forward to the msft copilot integration in office that can answer my emails and write transcripts of calls with to-dos. It will save time, but i think it will just up the ante since the culture is what got us here. And the risk of deals failing means you have to work on many at a time and accept as much as 100% swings in comp year to year. I would love to learn python, i figure with chatgpt i can learn it quickly. I learned vba with it and built bigger, crazier financial models but i still work the same amount… even my boss who is 50 is doing the same hrs.
With ai is it even worth it to try to get started in software or robotics? I feel like i will not be able to get a job bc these systems are advancing so fast, they will take the jr jobs first.
Value in my industry is really created from relationships (origination). The modeling and analysis work can probably be automated away with ai in a short time. I’m trying to bring the firm in that direction so that i can manage that.
As you say it's the culture of investment banking, Big Law, and some other subsets of certain industries. Those subsets pay extremely well but things like weekend work are just part of the package.
I'm not at all convinced AI is going to radically change the culture of most industries in the relatively near term. There have been enormous changes to the tooling for all kinds of tech over the past few decades and I don't really see big changes to the work culture--other than the pay for software development at "tech" companies often increasing relative to other types of engineering. (It's not clear to me that sort of differential is sustainable.)
(It sounds like you're in a position where you feel like you're compensated well enough that you'd be open to taking half the pay if it meant you could maintain the same return on investment: i.e. put in only half the work.)
By bringing up Copilot, it shows that you're already dabbling with adjacent ideas. Would love to know if/why you haven't considered this already and more about your work, including what parts, if any, make it a non-starter.
If we started having chatgpt respond to emails in my current job, I would bet that we'd lose all of our clients. I can't imagine automated communication in the context of personalized and nuanced interactions, especially when money is on the line. I'm sure somebody will tell me I'm wrong though...
Yeah, i think about 50% of them require a ton of thought and context. But some do not. If it could draft and just let me approve, i could save hours. This is just jevons paradox though.
The secret is automation that does things while you're doing other things. Parallel not series. I've even seen people secretly hire foreign virtual assistants to do their low value tasks for pennies while the employee focuses on the higher value tasks.
So I'm assuming that your comment is in reference to me casting doubt on the usefulness of automation in meetings, emails, and other forms of communication.
The point is that there's plenty of high level, technical, and nuanced communication that can only happen between experts. The expertise isn't documented anywhere (unless you count previous email exchanges), it's not somehow represented in a database, and often times decisions are highly specific to one particular situation. Asking a non expert to fulfill this role is difficult enough. I'm not convinced that this is a problem solved by technology.
I'm honestly not sure what I would use an admin for if you gave me one. A lot of what an executive admin does is dealing with the calendars of people who have far more demands on their time than they have time. And getting the status on various projects from people. Generally speaking, other than travel sometimes, I don't really have a lot of "Make it So!" tasks that I could delegate to an admin/assistant.
There are things that I'm not good at that I'm better off not spending time hacking at to do a mediocre job--e.g. web stuff generally or design--but that's really something else.
There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better.
In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious.
The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.
Part of the way I explain this is the amount of overhead in a company or position. Say you have 20 hours of coordination, planning and meetings/week, and 20 hours of direct work. If you work 50 hours you know increase how much development you are doing by 50% by only working 25% more hours. Now it the organization can do the same by cutting overhead and meetings but that is usually not up to one high performance contributor.
Like you said the impact of a top contributor doing 50% more work can be really large, entire new systems can be built, key features launched. It can get you promoted, but you definitely won’t get a 50% raise.
> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive.
It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better.
At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours.
Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.
During the (now semi-aborted) back-to-office push at my employer, several of us pointed out that a 9-5 in the office is impossible for those of us with children and a commute.
- 8:00am - earliest free drop-off time at school.
- 8:12 or 8:20 - next bus or train to the city. I can probably make that from the school, if I fully sprint for at least half that journey. (Taking a car is riskier; traffic around the school or the station, or bad parking, means that driving is wildly more variable.)
- 9:45 - earliest possible time I can roll into the office.
- 5:00 - I slam my laptop shut, having already put on my coat, and sprint to the subway and/or bike share to head to the train station.
- 5:16 - the earliest possible train I can make, assuming that all of Midtown stops for me.
- 6:31 - the earliest possible arrival back home, 31 minutes past aftercare's closing time.
The only way this would be doable is by hiring childcare for both mornings and afternoons, every day of the week, to the tune of ~$50 extra per day, minimum. That's on top of the cost of the commute.
When I was a kid, I would get dropped off early for “before school programs at school” and stay at “after school programs” at school and get picked up late because both of my parents worked full time. Do they not have those anymore (which sound like less money than “hiring childcare”)?
Many times the slots are all taken. Then there's the cost. These things cost money. Add commute spending and many people can't really afford both commute for them and morning and afternoon clubs for their kids.
I'm not sure. We pay a yearly rate, and it's significantly cheaper than it would be to pay per hour.
In any case, we already pay for the aftercare regardless of whether we're commuting to work that day or not; that's a cost that's already budgeted for.
I think in our case it was driven by the company's new owners not being based in our area, and not understanding that our commute and living situations are vastly different from theirs.
how did you do that before covid when working from home wasn't yet common?
i understand the problem for a single parent. in most countries they just can't work 8 hours a day. the time where kids are away for me for example is barely 8 hours by the clock. that is without commuting time and lunch break. once the kids come home someone needs to start preparing dinner, followed by housework.
with two parents however, one parent could work early, and the other could work late so that there is one parent around in the morning and one in the evening.
the trouble now is of course that this becomes a coordination problem with two different employers who have different expectations for the work schedule
> how did you do that before covid when working from home wasn't yet common?
Everything was different than the scenario I described in my earlier comment, including my employer. (And to be clear, my current employer dropped the 9-5 requirement when they realized they wouldn't have any engineers left if they tried to enforce it.)
The commute was significantly shorter, and we relied on the subway - not trains - which came more regularly.
There was no requirement for a 9-5, and so I could either do both drop-off and pick-up, or we could divide the responsibilities between my spouse and I.
Furthermore, we could work from home as necessary.
> with two parents however, one parent could work early, and the other could work late so that there is one parent around in the morning and one in the evening. the trouble now is of course that this becomes a coordination problem with two different employers who have different expectations for the work schedule
Exactly. And I would have choice words for an employer who suggested that the problem they're plopping in my lap for no reason should suddenly become my spouse's concern.
How is productivity measured in their study though? As it's survey based I presume self reported?
I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture?
I could well believe they actually are less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.
This aligns with my findings over the years. The more over invested I am in something the quicker productivity grinds to a halt. Mostly because I enthusiastically cornered myself and end up creating more problems than I’m solving.
Apathetic lazy me scoots on past workaholic me fairly easily on because it’s afraid of making itself busy later by accident.
1998 article with quotes from Jim Goodnight, CEO of analytics software company SAS: One big difference is that Goodnight and most of his staff work a 35-hour week. "We want people to go home and be with their families," he says. "This will make them more productive when they are at work. I would prefer that rather than have them non-productive for 12 months while they are getting over a divorce."
This is a very good article. The core is that "productivity" is extremely hard to measure for most white-collar jobs, or indeed anything that isn't piecework or an assembly line. Even if you can assign a number to annual or monthly productivity (salespeople have monthly targets), you can't assign it to individual minutes of the day.
So people end up producing the appearance of productivity instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.
Person reports working extra hours. Person also reports feeling behind schedule.
I mean, is it really surprising these two are correlated? I'm pretty sure the causation works as follows: they're working extra hours because, like, they felt behind.
Some people who aren't behind may work extra hours anyway...for fun? But I'm guessing that's less people. Not to mention there's cognitive bias at play: these people might not even self-report that as "working extra hours".
Catchy title and some of us read the slack link that's posted in the comments. But I guess also look at how many people posted the exact same response. Maybe they are right, people don't read.
My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion.
My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job.
Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.