[cvwright]

Just wanted to point out that this

> I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied.

and this

> used to leave at 5pm sharp

are not mutually exclusive.

We have this weird thing in tech where we think that, to be passionate, you have to work yourself into the ground. But this is stupid. There's organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week. For one thing, they make fewer mistakes and thus have less work to re-do. Fewer bugs to fix.

I've done more than one stretch of intense, focused programming and CS research work when I was a grad student. There was one period of two weeks when my buddy and I both put in about 116 hours one week and 118 hours the next week. I have basically no memory of anything that happened in those weeks, and I never have since like one month afterwards -- like a drug addict on a bender or something. I guess it worked out OK. We got our papers published. But our actual productivity in those last few weeks must have been absolute garbage.

In contrast, I spent last academic year on sabbatical building out my side project, and I don't think there was even one week where I put in more than 60 hours. Personally I can sustain 45 or 50-hour weeks basically indefinitely. But if I ever tried to push it above 55, there was a big price to be paid, and I was useless and braindead for the following day or two.

Be passionate, love what you do, but don't hurt yourself doing it.

There's a quote that I like: Most people vastly over-estimate what they can achieve with intense effort over the span of a week. And they vastly under-estimate what they can accomplish with sustained, moderate effort over the course of a year.

[WalterBright]

> going back decades

Longer than that. In WW2, factories increased hours to 60 to increase production. The workers were all on board with this. Production increased for a while, and then dipped below the 40 hour results.

Some experimentation showed that to get a sustained increase in production, the working hours would be increased for a time, and then brought back to 40, back and forth.

Personally, I'm well aware that when my tiredness exceeds a certain level, any programming work I do has to be undone (thank you, git!) and redone after I'm rested. What I do when I want to work, but am tired, is work on things that don't require much attention, like organizing my office, making backups, etc.

[Qub3d]

NPR's Planet Money just did a great look at this: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049786108/nice-work-week-if-...

Its very interesting--the research they present suggests that people worked much less before industrialization. It jumped massively as lots of low-skill people took factory jobs for the first time and worked 12+16 hour days, but since then has steadily declined again.

This was the big takeaway for me:

"...some of the leading economic thinkers of the last century expected the gradual shortening of the work week would just keep going. None other than John Maynard Keynes, one of the most important figures in economics - and imaginary friend to the show - famously predicted that we would all be working a 15-hour work week by 2030."

What a crazy idea. Or is it?

[lobocinza]

The Hawthorne experiment found something similar. If I remember it correctly. Both increasing/reducing the illumination in a factory resulted in increased productivity. Unfortunately I think managerial sciences are long dead since consultancy BS took over.

[pavas]

Wasn't the point that change itself caused productivity to increase?

[lobocinza]

Yep, such was the conclusion.

[littlestymaar]

> Just wanted to point out that this

> > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied.

> and this

> > used to leave at 5pm sharp

> are not mutually exclusive.

For some people it is actually. I'm an evening person and my personal productivity starts increasing during the afternoon. If I leave at 5pm, I leave right when I reach the peak. So when I care about my job it's really hard for me to live before 7pm, and if I didn't have a family I'd probably work until 9 or 10 every night (I still occasionally enjoy staying up until 2am or later every once in a while when I'm on a really interesting subject). A good recipe for a burn-out in the long run I guess.

[whatamota]

You can start working late in such cases. We have a lot of people who come to office at 1pm, and stay till 8pm.

If you are instead the kind of person who really works hard when "in the zone", you can try working 10-12 hours a day when you are motivated and then take a vacation/work 3 hours a day when you are out of your zone. That way you can charge up for your next "in zone" phase.

Kids get used to their parents being there all day during some days and not being there during others. As long as you can be there for them when there is something important for them, they and you would be fine.

[littlestymaar]

> If you are instead the kind of person who really works hard when "in the zone", you can try working 10-12 hours a day when you are motivated and then take a vacation/work 3 hours a day when you are out of your zone. That way you can charge up for your next "in zone" phase.

> Kids get used to their parents being there all day during some days and not being there during others. As long as you can be there for them when there is something important for them, they and you would be fine.

I wish I met a boss who “got used to it” :p.

Anyways, the biggest issue for this lifestyle when you have a family isn't spending enough quality time with your children, it's helping your partner with all the stuff you need to do for the kids (bring them to school, make their dinner, give them a bath, etc. etc.).

[jackson1442]

That's what I do personally. I'm a student, so I'm not working consistently full time but there are definitely days where I'll work 9+ hours and days where I work 3 or not at all. Usually averages out to about what my hours goal for the week is, it just depends entirely on how I'm feeling on a given day (and I'm hourly, so I track all this).

[devdas]

And then you get the managerial types who demand your presence for morning meetings.

[lolc]

When I work at night I won't be in the next day. Or return in the afternoon to clean the branch for review.

Sometimes I work a weekend. Love the ability to work on the rainy days and go outside when the weather is good.

[kittiepryde]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793826/

Do you happen to know of good studies to back up --- organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week --- I've heard this before, but, I've never seen the studies talked about.

I found this study via Googling, it took a little longer than I would like to admit. (I'm probably using the wrong search terms)

It definitely paints a more complicated picture - from a manager perspective, they could say that more hours equals more work - except they should be measuring worker engagement according to the study I linked, because it's more heavily associated with productivity than total hours worked - but they could say this is hard to do, it's just cheaper for the company to make everyone work more? That kind of company is definitely a place I would not want to work, but more studies, might make it easier to justify a change if you find yourself in one of these organizations?

[_y5hn]

I were going to say this, but found it in the Results / Conclusions part (nice link!). So to paraphrase:

Results: Working >40 to 50 hours per week and >50 hours per week were significantly positively associated with work productivity in univariate analysis. However, the significant association no longer held after adjusting for work engagement. Work engagement was positively associated with work productivity even after controlling for potential confounders. Working hours were not significantly associated with work productivity among those with high-work engagement or among those with low-work engagement.

Conclusions: Working hours did not have any significant associations with work productivity when taking work engagement into account. Work engagement did not moderate the influence of working hours on work productivity, though it attenuated the relationship between working hours and work productivity.

In my personal experience of workplace since 90's, whenever you have the chance to "level up", work a bit extra to gain a bit more progress and experience, it's absolutely worth it. If you don't gain anything by it or have no meaningful work to do (ie. process-related tasks and projects), it is worth more to you to leave work for another day.

I've become sensitive enough I can feel the stress begin to build at the end of the day, and know which day is worth to leave work (most days), and which rare day is worth more to you to stay a bit longer just to follow that flow out to its end.

Anything new after 3PM can wait to next day. Your mind will anyways work it out in the background if it's important somehow.

[raducu]

Some places can thrive with lots of overtime -- if they can attract the right kind of people, like Space X can. Other places can do great if their employees have no alternatives -- like Amazon. Some can do extremely well if they use slave labor, like ancient Rome or USA.

But in the vast majority of cases a lot of hours worked cannot be sustainable or beneficial to the employee.

[cvwright]

The main result that I’m thinking of is quite old — going back to the Ford assembly line days IIRC. NPR had a great segment on it several years ago. I’m on mobile now, but I’ll try to so some digging when I get back to a real computer.

I suppose there’s a valid question about how well those oldest results transfer from manual labor over to knowledge work like programming. The NPR guest that I’m remembering seemed to think that the effect might actually be even stronger for knowledge work, not weaker.

[notJim]

Exactly this, I've believed in (to varying degrees) the mission of every place I've worked, and still feel passionate about the projects I'm working on, and enjoy the work I'm doing. I've also rarely worked more than 40-45 hours a week, and fairly often work less than that. If I ever worked somewhere that actually required more than that I would find a different job, because I am not built for working many hours per week.

[Aeolun]

> There's organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week.

I feel like this has less to do with the amount of hours worked and more with the kind of organisation/manager that would have their employees actually working 40 hour weeks.