[jasim]

I once worked for a German company (remotely) who made it clear that working beyond 6pm wouldn't lead to much progress, and my lead consistently logged out at just the time. So I had to follow his example and couldn't potter around after. I still love the team for that. But we consistently did a solid day's worth of work everyday and there wasn't much juice left to continue after.

[globuous]

My dad was working for a big oil company. He once told me a pretty funny story. The company had just switched CEOs, and the new CEO was walking around the office around 7:30pm, knocked on my dad's door and asked him "sir, are you bad at your job ?" My dad was surprised because he thought he had a reputation of being pretty good at it. The new CEO then asked him "so if you're good at your job, why are you still in the office at 7:30pm ?". The ideo being that someone good could finish his workload soon enough to be back home with his family by 7:30. That contrasted so much with the "stay at work as long as you can to show you're working hard" culture so many companies have.

[standardUser]

That practically brings a tear to my eye. We need a world with a lot more of those bosses.

[vbtemp]

I love this.

First time I was a engineering lead, things were going great, to the point we simply weren't busy... Long lunches, chill days, making good friendships. The younger staff became worried that they weren't busy and didn't have anything to do, because they were so used to always having backlogs of bugs and other random assignments to do. I simply said, this is what life is like when you're good at what you do - you reward good work with pleasantness instead of more work!

[iancmceachern]

This. This is good management.

[BrandoElFollito]

This is what I do (French company). I then do basically the same thing afterwards (coding and learning tech) but for my pleasure.

Then I have time to check with the kids, have dinner and watch a movie or go biking (well, the latter got complicated with our covid measures).

And the next day I am happy to be back at work.

The big, big difference is that I am in France and cannot be forced to many things, this could just have an inpact on my career (which it does not and I could not care less anyway)

[tartoran]

Yes, they’re not stressing out the team, perhaps they have long term growth in mind.

> But we consistently did a solid day's worth of work everyday and there wasn't much juice left to continue after.

I find that a bit much, one is to expect some downtime so employees switch modes a bit, maybe do research on their own on the company time, say, maybe 4-5 hours a week. Squeezing up to the last drop, even if it’s paid and within the normal 40 hours a week, is not the best way to let your employees grow.

[kazen44]

in my experience this is the norm in most european companies.

If you need to do overwork to reach the good levels of productivity something is seriously wrong in your company. Sure, moments of overwork happen, but in my experience it is usually seen as a failure in management if this happens regularly.