[benjohnson]

As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.'

I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work.

Thankfully everybody has responded well - I have one employee than needs me to randomly call them to keep then honest, but he's a good guy and I think is struggling with a bit of depression. He likes to be called and he likes our chats.

[dkersten]

Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables? I mean, if I work extra hard to get the days work done in 4 hours, why can’t I leave early compared to a co-worker who is working less focused and more slowly?

I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since it doesn’t encourage working more efficiently, effectively or smarter, because you gotta get those 8 hours in regardless.

Unless they’re contractors/consultants who bill by the hour, of course.

[sharkweek]

I worked for a startup where the founder/CEO mandated 40 hours of work a week, no more or less.

He would always say “I want you to work your ass off while you’re here but I also don’t want you taking this home with you. The company is paying you for forty hours of your time a week.”

The expectation, which everyone seemed to find fair enough, was that if you didn’t have enough to fill 40 hours that you find other projects to help with or tinker with new ideas.

Honestly it was a great culture and they had a sizable acquisition exit so I guess it worked even as the company got north of 600ish employees by the time they were bought.

Was everyone honest about it? No of course not, but enough were that people bought in.

[dkersten]

There is no incentive to find ways to accomplish more or better other than personal drive then, though (and personal drive eventually wears thin on its own, imho). If you have to work 40 hours, even if you get everything done early (in which case you gotta take the next task from the list, a never ending grind -- when do you get to celebrate a job well done?), even if you're head isn't in it (maybe you're not feeling well, or have something else going on, or are just bored, or have a day of mental block), you gotta get your hours in. Even if you have some very focused productive days and get everything done in record time, you gotta get your hours in.

[kirstenbirgit]

I think I often push work without realizing it, but I feel that often I'm done around 16.00 or before lunch.

If I know I have to be there anyways, I might as well goof off a little.

If no-one cared about the hours but I just had hard deliverables every day/week/month, I'd work much faster so I can go home earlier.

Depends on the project, too. Some I'm more interested in than others.

[dkersten]

Yeah. I’d also add that goofing off isn’t ok, in the sense that it’s time that’s wasted typically on unimportant time wasters while if you could get off early you could use that time for something useful, like spending it with family or on exercise or a hobby. But you can’t do those things because you’re still technically on the clock, so spend the time on HN or twitter or whatever instead, not helping yourself or your employer.

[crashedsnow]

+1. Outside hourly contractors, if you have a clear sense of what impact/outcome you're seeking, time of day or number of hours shouldn't matter. Often I suspect it's a proxy for NOT having a clear idea of the desired outcomes. Removing a requirement for "8 hours a day" can even be a good forcing function to ensure you DO have a clear and well-communicated set of goals and outcomes. Indexing on time (IMHO) can also have unwanted side effects like people just filling in the time "because they have to", which is pointless for everyone involved.

[WalterBright]

Consider the practice of "work to rule".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Precisely defining what at employee is to do is not really practical. At some point it's always going to be "do what I mean, not what I say."

[benjohnson]

I limit our employees work to 40 hours a week so we don't have burn out. I want people to work hard and then go home.

So far, so good: Our employees are constantly coming up with better ways of doing things - with less stress, hassle, and annoyance. Over the last three years, our works has gone from suffering 40 hours to an enjoyable but hard-working 40 hours. Our retention rate has gone from 40% to 95%.

[benjohnson]

I need to be explicit - it's timed to both time and deliverables. 40 hours of productive work - productivity is defines and delivering value to the customer. The customer can be internal.

We don't work overtime and only one person is on call (wait time is paid at time and a half) on Saturday.

[benjohnson]

I need to be explicit - it's to both time and deliverables. 40 hours of productive work - productivity is defines and delivering value to the customer. The customer can be internal.

We don't work overtime and only one person is on call (wait time is paid at time and a half) on Saturday.

[93po]

This didn't answer the question

[skybrian]

Whether this benefits the employee or employer more is very case-specific. Without any rules, even productive people are tempted to work longer hours. They may feel guilty about not being more productive, since this has more to do with emotional state than a realistic idea of how your work compares with others.

Setting limits on how long people work could have a better impact in terms of work-life balance than being able to quit early once in a while.

[eointierney]

Work and hard work.

We all know it's easy to "work" as in get "stuff done" but "hard work" is the basis of our economy. Part of the problem is the notion of hardness, a dimensionless constant on the Moh scale which you can look up elsewhere. Difficulty, as in the complexity of thought required to predict a system, is another matter altogether. We should speak instead of power, the ability to perform work quickly.

I know a few powerful thinkers. Give them a problem and they'll return an appreciation quickly. An answer will follow, and more thereafter, until things settle, and they can share their understanding.

One of the most useful techniques in this regard is contextualisation, whereby we physically, perhaps synesthaestically, abstract ourselves from our abstractions by being with, and learning from, each other. Think of children and think of Alan Kay.

Children put in all their time to being children. When we're employed we're employed as adults. Eight hours of work is equivalent to eight hours of cooking and cleaning, or playing and teaching, of exploring and learning. When we pay each other to be adults we maintain all the rest of society.

Paid by hour or minute we're best off working as autonomous heroes for the greater good.

I love hacker news, smart people share politely. I can show my Mother on occasion. But Hacker News is still just a bit of a cuter slashdot with pretentions of lambdatheultimate and a healthy dash of shtetloptimised, downed with a bit of whatever you're having yourself.

[gexla]

> Unless they’re contractors/consultants who bill by the hour, of course.

Unless an 8 hour day of work was part of the agreement of the job.

There's no more to it than that. You signed up for an 8 hour work day. An emergency situation in which you work from home isn't going to change that.

Otherwise, why would you peg your performance to the lowest common denominator.

[dingaling]

> Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables?

Once you make a deliverable the metric, work interaction and innovation suffers.

Say Bob finishes assigned Task-A in six hours. However Alice is struggling with her Task-B and could do with some of Bob's Java expertise. But in a deliverable-driven environment, Bob's done and clocks out. See ya Alice!

Or Alice is waiting for an informal reply from Trent, but Trent's reply is not a manager-assigned deliverable so he doesn't bother responding. He wants to press ahead and get Task-C finished so that he can clock out.

Instead of focusing on deliverables, most employers therefore focus on 'time dwelling' in the hope that people will interact and share the work burden.

[closeparen]

You generally don't hire people who are twice as capable as the existing team by accident. Tech companies invest enormously in sourcing, selecting, and closing people like that. They want to see a return. If you're just going to calibrate your performance to the median, they could have spent less time and money hiring someone cheaper and less talented

I guess I'd understand if the company were not trying to "innovate" or "raise the bar" or anything, just fulfill some mundane requirements at the lowest cost, and paid accordingly.

[eikenberry]

Quite possibly the work is time base, not delivery based. Eg. A call center employees might need to be on-call (time) even if there are no active calls (deliverables).

[dkersten]

That's a fair point and certainly a reasonable reason to mandate hours. Thanks for pointing it out.

[em-bee]

employees are billed by the hour. that's how employment is defined in most countries. it's a payment for about 40 hours of work per week.

one of the key points of employment is that i get s reliable salary regardless of my performance. sure, if my performance is continuously very bad then my employer may want to make an adjustment (or let me go) and likewise if my performance is good i may expect a raise.

in general that stability of income is more important than the ability to go home earlier. because the latter means that i have to work more if things don't go well because deliverables are often hard to define. in IT at least. what do you count? lines of code? number of issues closed?

one week i may close a dozen issues, the next week a single task may have stumped me, requiring me to do days of research.

deliverables reslly only work on a large scale: "finish this project" or for a sysadmin: "keep the servers running". my customer or employer doesn't care how many hours i spend on that. if there are no problems then i am free, or i may get a bonus for closing a project early.

[mannykannot]

Most of the jobs with well-defined deliverables that can be completed in a few hours are pretty tedious, and they are the sort of job whose workers are most easily exploited with sweatshop tactics and in the gig economy.

[jdavis703]

Some companies also have to bill their customers by the hour. For example certain government contracts, grants and even private contracting are paid out based on hours worked.

[mrbgty]

Good to hear that you care about your employees and understand that he likes the chats.

Generally, IMO, you shouldn't be hiring people and then checking up on them and their hours to keep them honest. There's better uses of time. That time spent tracking and keeping them honest doesn't really improve you, them or the company.

[benjohnson]

You're right - I shouldn't have to do it. But he's a good guy, and I'm happy to invest the time to see him through this difficult time. I couldn't sustain it if all my employees were like that, but right now it's a small burden to help someone that seems to need it.

[throwaway789394]

Generally yes. But if he has adhd then far away timelines may be less useful than focusing on weekly deliverables. Could very well be a win-win. Good job parent!

[siva7]

Actually clocking in seems a fairly outdated method for tech workers. I certainly wouldn‘t want to work in an environment where the manager has such a low view of trust on the people he employs.

[_bxg1]

As a salaried employee I find it insulting, demeaning, and even distracting when I'm forced to record hours, not even mentioning what being spied on would do to me (thankfully I've never had to deal with the latter situation). Gladly, my current workplace doesn't have any such procedures. My previous one was fairly stringent on hour-recording even when working at the office.

I am not a child nor an inmate, and can therefore be trusted not to try and game the system to do as little work as I can possibly get away with. I shoot for eight hours. If things go past nine hours without a specific source of pressing urgency, I don't feel uncomfortable asserting my work-life balance. If I really get into the zone and have a super-productive day I don't feel uncomfortable logging off after seven hours.

Whereas if I'm on a clock, I'm watching the clock, constantly. I have trouble entering a deep-work headspace. I feel guilty and second-guess myself every time I stand up for a minute. I'll subconsciously space out at my desk more often because "I'm putting in the hours".

Everybody's different, I just wanted to add a data point. I'm somewhat ADD and if I'm forced to be either completely on and tracking the minutes or completely off, instead of jumping back and forth like I naturally do, my productivity tanks.

[tluyben2]

Not sure what your line of business is or what your employees do, but when working with teams of devs, the day is made up out of focused work, small tech meetings and maybe a bigger meeting. Remote or local makes little difference with us here. Outside those, which need to be more or less synchronised, the rest are deliverables. Some days I am done in 2 hours or I just am unproductive (slept badly, cannot be arsed, nothing works anymore after a minor react native update, whatever the reason); some days code is flowing and I stand behind my desk 17 hours (like today). My colleagues are like that as well, at least by far most of them. With your regime, I would be frustrated on both occasions.

I do not understand (and that does not mean you are wrong; maybe there is no wrong or I am) how anyone conflates hours with productivity; you want me to do tasks a1-a10 this week; why is it relevant if I do those Thursday night in 16 hours or 40 hours spread over the week? As long as they get done and done well right? I cannot think which type of work would not work like that but cannot think of any so how is it related to ‘hours behind the screen’? I have tried these things in the past as well with my colleagues over the years and the ‘bums on seats’ only invites people to work slower (to fill the time and not have to do more work) which in turn indeed invites the use of spyware to see if they are working.

Now we have tasks; if some superhuman does them in 5 minutes instead of 40 hours; glory to her. Obviously that does not happen, but 30 vs 40 does sometimes and that is fine with me; stuff gets delivered, people are happy. I also have a few guys who get nothing done one week and over-perform the next; as long as I know that, it is fine. Weekly sprints are overrated anyway imho.

[justsomedude11]

So you would rather have someone who works 8h and timestamps their time, but performs worse than someone else who achieves the same or more in less time but doesn't document every minute they spend not working in a shift?

[throwaway888abc]

Respect to your actions. Valuable lesson to others. You should put it somewhere online as part of sane remote work guide.

[analog31]

Just one minor thing, if your employees are salaried, it's worth finding out what the actual rules are for clocking time. If hourly, then you've already got it figured out.

[drewcoo]

Congratulations?