[jcadam]

Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor. Which is why I fully understand why my employer is requiring me (and the others on my team) to make up the 48 hours of labor I lost when I evacuated due to Hurricane Irma (even though the office was of course closed for much of that time).

I'm spending the extra hours perusing/posting on HN and looking at job listings :|

[panarky]

> Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor.

Not all hours are created equally.

I do my best work with hyperfocus.

I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities.

This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of.

But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week.

All the normal but necessary distractions take at least four hours a day, and I need at least an hour or two of "non-zone" work before I can hit my stride and achieve flow.

So I find 60-70 hours a week is essential to doing my best work.

But I can't sustain that level of effort continuously for years.

So I balance that out with a week a month of low-intensity "work" (slacking/procrastinating/socializing) plus at least twelve weeks per year of contiguous time for uninterrupted travel, long-distance trekking, rebuilding relationships damaged by hyperfocus, etc.

[hedora]

I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours.

Personally, I find the usual distractions more tiring than coding, based on years of experience.

I estimate at least 2 hours of work lost per hour of meeting, once you add in meeting prep, calendar wrangling, walking, after and before meeting back chatter, realizing you have 30 minutes till lunch/commute after/before the meeting, being tired from presenting/listening/arguing, etc.

One strategy is to have meeting-only or meeting-free days, so meetings primarily ruin your productivity for other meetings and not your actual work.

Meeting-only days scale with team size, but can backfire by enabling the total number of hours in meetings to increase.

[watwut]

"I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours."

Pretty much this. When you are explaing long hours by on the job ineffectively, then you need to deal with on the job ineffectivity - especially if you are in any kind of leadership position. Otherwise you end up rewarding innefective workers and punish workers with better organizational skill.

General feeling that it is ok to work ineffectively because we stay late anyway was one of the things I resented the most in previous job. And people who caused interruptions and wasted everybody time were seen as "hard workers" because they stayed late.

[thecardcheat]

I think @jcadam was being snarky, not serious.

[somethingabout]

How do you get 3 months of vacation?

[billforsternz]

I enjoyed this +1 but sadly and inevitably there are replies saying essentially "no no, all man hours are not equal". Why doesn't the intertube get satire/sarcasm/irony ?

[vacri]

Text is a bad way of conveying tone, though there was the smiley at the end. I interpreted it the same as you, but I can see how a lot of people would miss the tone.

Poe's Law is why the internet doesn't get sarcasm - that without additional information, it's impossible to differentiate between an extreme position and one mocking it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

[billforsternz]

The comment we're talking about was skillfully constructed, there's only one way of interpreting it. On a phone so quoting from memory, but the second paragraph starting "that's why I am spending the time perusing HN..." is just an elegant way of saying that the first paragraph was tongue in cheek.

[s73ver_]

I really hope the rest of your team is doing so, too. Companies like that don't deserve good employees.

[jcadam]

Oh, yea. Although, this sort of thing is actually fairly common for my industry (defense contracting), so I'm not sure any of us will end up anyplace better.

[anitil]

The funny thing is, if you just eat the cost, any halfway conscientious worker is going to pay it back in kind. Maybe a few extra hours here or there, maybe a little bit more emotional investment in the work.

[TimPC]

Not all hours are created equal. If you're doing simple enough tasks perhaps your output is relatively stable. When I work on hard problems I've had single hours that can outperform a day or two. Getting rid of most/all of those key creative moments by keeping employees in a constant state of fatigue from large hours is bad. Studies show for typical employees after about 6 weeks of 70h work weeks a 70h week is producing less than a 40h week for a fresh non-overworked employee. So pretty quickly hours become half-hours in terms of production.

[jtmarmon]

That's ridiculous