[patient_zero]

What I find sad about this (and other articles like this) is when the time comes within the article to lay out how to avoid burnout and stress, the list nevver includes ways to spend less time working. It's almost like an unspoken rule. I know that to recommend that is to take a chance with your livelihood but I really hope that we can at least stop blaming ourselves for the ridiculous work/life ratio we currently must shoulder to live.

Off the top of my head, there should be a moratorium on requiring email responses for non-essentials outside of office hours. I'd like to get rid of most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour. I've a sneaking suspicion that all the crazy hours that are currently "required by the times" would miraculously evaporate once employers were charged for the time they demand of their people.

[zaptheimpaler]

As far as I can tell, media never says the bald truth that everyone knows in the back of their heads -

We live in an extremely competitive world where we must fight for our livelihoods. The majority of non-white-collar jobs are worse than whatever crap we have to put up with in the good jobs - they get treated worse, paid less, and have less prospects to escape their situation. So every high-paying becomes increasingly competitive, and you cannot realistically spend too little time working or push back too much because you will be replaced. Employers have always been tyrannical to the greatest degree they can get away with, and they will always do so. They don't care, they will squeeze everything they can out of you. Only reason some programmers have it good for now is extremely short supply, and thats quickly changing as more people rush into the field.

That entire structure makes things very convenient for the rich people at the top. As long as there are enough people stuck in dead-end situations, they can simply pay a little better and have a supply of people willing to do anything - program weapons or junk ads, work 80 hours/week whatever. Its a question of power plain & simple and its frankly ridiculous how many hoops people collectively jump through to avoid facing that fact.

[esoterica]

> I'd like to get rid of most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour.

I think having someone counting the number of hours you have your butt in a seat is a particularly degrading form of micromanagement, and I'm glad I don't have to endure it. Your TC is the only number that matters; there's no financial difference between getting paid 300k and no overtime and getting paid 200k + 100k overtime. It's silly to claim that the one is exploitative and the other is not just because the former involves "unpaid overtime".

[Negitivefrags]

We pay all our developers by the hour, and I think it's super important.

To correct your first misconception, we don't count peoples hours, people just tell us how many hours they worked each pay cycle.

We also pay 1.5X per hour for more than 40 hours per week if we asked you to work extra.

The primary advantage is that it aligns everyone incentives. In management I know that there is a very real cost to us if we ask people to work more hours.

It's important that we feel the sting, because it means that we are less likely ask people to work overtime, and only when it's really important.

It also lets people work more or less as they choose. Some people might choose to work 30 hour weeks for a while, and it doesn't cause resentment in other team members. People know they are getting paid less for doing it.

[hellisothers]

I’ve been a software engineer for 18 years and have had 4 jobs, only one (brief) one was hourly and it was arguably the least satisfying by far. I was seen as a resource which is essentially what you’re arguing for “if you’re paid hourly then your time is more valued by management”, but the problem is you’re never given the freedom to roam. Your time is always over managed and accounted for, I could never get into a “flow” state. I imagine that company never created anything novel, it was just factory work.

[AlphaSite]

I mean it’s means it encourages people to work hard, not smart. That’s a direct disalignment of incentives.

[tonyedgecombe]

Salaried work has misaligned incentives as well, hence the article.

[dancek]

This is basically how every company theoretically does it in Finland, because of legislation. But then some people work 9 hours and report 8 because they feel pressured to perform better. Or they constantly work long days and receive balance hours (that could be used as vacation), which are cut once a year.

I do like the system, but there are times when you still have to stand up for yourself if your company isn't one of the fairest.

[patient_zero]

well, I can't speak directly to your situation, but my comment is mostly hinging on my belief that all the mandatory meetings and 'just one more thing' emails we currently deal with would suddenly be less frequent if management had to be mindful of their time and cost.

[marmaduke]

I have worked for the same employer as both hourly consultant and salaried employee. I saw much more restraint on their part when hours were being counted. On the other hand I am now able to push salary aspect in my favor (ie rely on same salary even if I have to take time off for child’s illness, for example)

[alkonaut]

I consider myself “paid by the hour” even if I’m not formally paid by the hour. I log my time and have a bank of hours that can’t go outside +/-20 hours. If I did 41 hours last week I’ll do 39 next week. I’ll never take a position where I do more than 40h on average. There is no amount of money that will be compensation enough for regular 45h weeks.

[wutbrodo]

Yup, exactly.

Excluding those that are very low on the income scale, for whom everyone agrees life is difficult, I simply don't understand the claims of inescapable demands on skilled white-collar workers' time. If you're making any sort of non-negligible surplus above the basics, then you're at some level making a conscious choice of that surplus (usually for consumption) over a lower-stress job.

I have a friend who's a quant at Goldman Sachs, whose work life is miserable but who makes a good 150k more than me. His labor isn't (currently) valued at more than mine: I could get a similar TC with little effort and a much _better_ working environment, but I have absolutely no interest: I'm consciously trading off compensation consumption for a better work-life balance. The flipside is that he's consciously trading off quality of life for more compensation, for whatever his personal reasons are. It's bizarre to me to claim that it's a bad thing that that choice is presented to him (or to me for that matter).

I get that this sounds like a general-purpose argument against worker protections, but there's a key difference: in the absence of a robust, UBI-like safety net, we as a society have accepted that coercion can include nominally consensual actions taken to avoid bumping up against a lack of whatever we've defined as the basic necessities that everyone is entitled to (food, shelter, etc).

But the work burnout problem is, statistically, almost entirely a middle- and upper-class problem[1], and these are precisely the people who have the comp surplus to consciously choose to trade off compensation for a better quality of life.

I know as always the dimmer readers of comments like this will pattern-match this to the victim-blaming buzzword, but you can simultaneously bemoan the state of a culture and work to improve your lot within it. In this case, there's a fairly simple, concrete solution: perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level.

[1] the job-related woes of lower income people tend to involve not being able to get enough employment and thus enough income to live off of

[mratzloff]

> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours

Citation needed.

Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job.

[wutbrodo]

What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level."

For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you should be doing it already.

The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from productivity.

> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job

I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

[mratzloff]

> I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

I'm sorry my comment upset you. It wasn't my intention.

My point was that in many cases people are inclined to work longer as a result of social pressure when it has no positive impact on productivity. In that case, are longer hours "required"? Or is it strictly a choice? My interpretation of what you said was perhaps more binary than you intended.

In those cases, one can simply work less, shrug off the social pressure, and perform at the same level. You allude to this (sort of) in your second paragraph, but this is not as obvious to many people as you state and, I think, benefits from saying explicitly.

[ravenstine]

Hopefully you didn't learn this from doing overtime, paid or voluntary? I had to learn the hard way, in part because my dad is naturally a hard worker, so I think I took after him. Eventually I figured out that working more hours virtually never pays off, and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.

[mgkimsal]

> and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.

when you 'trade' you get something of value in return. if you're getting paid and you think it's a fair pay, it's not automatically 'stupid'. saving more now to pay for future expenses, nest egg, rainy day fund, whatever? how can that be 'stupid'? You have an opportunity to provide the means for a more secure future for your family, today, when that ability may be in doubt - take the pay now for more work.

your dad being a 'hard worker' may have been able to provide things to you that you never knew about at the time (or may never know about).

[esoterica]

That's a pretty silly line to draw in the sand. No amount of compensation to work 45 hours, really? Even if someone offered you enough money to retire 20 years early, you'd rather spend an extra 20 years doing the 9-5 just to avoid spending 1 extra hour a day at work?

If you made enough money you could easily save 10+ hours a week by moving closer to work, paying people to run errands for you etc. You could easily have more free time working 50 hours a week than someone with less money would working 40.

[alkonaut]

Anything has a price of course, but realistically there is no position that would let me retire earlier (nor do I want to).

My 40h is also already 100% remote, so very hard to improve on in terms of commutes etc. In fact, if I were to switch to non-remote I’d never accept a 40h ass-in-seat position either.

[esoterica]

Even a 20% pay raise would let you retire several years earlier, assuming you don't spend any of the extra pay.

[alkonaut]

A 20% pay rise is 10% after taxes here and wouldn’t make a huge difference. Also, I hope and intend to work well into my 70s. For that I need to not burn out in my 40s. I’m happy with what I do. I don’t need more money or more years retired. I need a job I’m happy with, money for bills and time with my family now. I pick up kids from school every day at 4 and make them dinner at 5. All this must sound pretty foreign to Americans...

[paganel]

> Also, I hope and intend to work well into my 70s. For that I need to not burn out in my 40s.

Glad I’m not the only one having this exact line of thought about my future career. If it matters I live in Eastern Europe and I’m approaching 40.

[airbreather]

Aussie?

[herbst]

I would never work more in the hopes to retire earlier. I've worked different time models between essentially do whatever I want and 42 hour weeks. All of them paid for my living standard (which I would say is rather simple).

Everything above 35 hours feels like I have no time for myself anymore.

I think the main reason why I don't get the 'FIRE' mentality is because in my country we have a healthy pension system I can look forward to.

[blablabla123]

I think employees also need to start taking care of themselves by not following up on every single spontaneous request and also to find something else in time when things turn too toxic.

At least for me I can say that I don't follow up on every single request I get, especially when it's many little ones after "the heavy lifting" is done. Management must also learn that this is not bearable.

Of course one needs to be in a somehow comfortable position and one probably needs a few years of work in the field. Still, for employers it's also a risk to find good (replacement) employees which I have never heard management would admit but seen after leaving positions.

[CalRobert]

This is doable when you have rock-solid confidence that you will never be let go (or you have fuck you money).

Otherwise, there's always gonna be another chump in their 20's who thinks they're just putting in their dues before being able to dial it back a bit, and you're competing with them.

[blablabla123]

At least for me it's not about being protected from getting fired or having a giant pile of money. It's more the knowledge that I can find something, worst case within a week because even today everybody is searching devs like crazy. Of course one needs also enough money above credit limit for going at least a month without income.

[bdamm]

This is it. When employees realize that only they can control what they respond to and what they do not, outside of direct requests from management, then they can manage their time for the life they want. Until then, people stuck thinking they can offload time management to their managers will keep wondering why they’re feeling overworked.

[CalRobert]

This times 1000 - it's amazing how often my colleagues talk about how they worked on something over the weekend or just take it for granted that I want to keep chatting about their crap after 6 PM. Or bosses who say "can you deploy that?" when it's 5:30

[gerbilly]

Man I used to have jobs where I'd come in at 10:30 and leave by two, and I mean in a normal company that 'expected' 9 to 5.

I've never owned or used an alarm clock.

I did however manage to save the project on more than one occasion.¹

When people complain I tell them I'm an ability guy, not an availability guy. If they don't like that then I move on.

¹ One time I hacked a buggy compiler we received from IBM that was preventing us from presenting a demo at a trade show. I did it in 8 hours and we made the trade show in time.

[grecy]

> the list never includes ways to spend less time working. It's almost like an unspoken rule.

Having just spent years outside the developed world and "working", I realize now that it is very much a spoken rule that "Thou shalt contribute to the economy".

> I know that to recommend that is to take a chance with your livelihood

That's a strange statement to make - it's like you are agreeing with the unspoken rule!

Working less absolutely doesn't take a chance with your livelihood. Step down to 4 days a week and drive a use car, don't have a TV and don't buy a new cell phone. At the end of the month you'll still have exactly the same money.

Step down to three days a week and just live in a smaller place and cut out more things - you'll still have exactly the same money.

There are no chances being taken there, just choices.

[sgt101]

I think that there is a chance with job security - if you step down you leave the "core group". On the other hand I've seen a lot of people panic about being let go and then realise that actually they have the savings and set up to let them come - abet at a lower "standard" of living than before (no new BMW's, no new 75" TV's, etc). There are limits on this though - especially for folks with kids or dependent relatives. Some people are flogging themselves and living in fear to make other people's end's meet, so to speak.

[Tempest1981]

Even worse than requiring email responses: heavy use of text messages outside of "normal" hours.