| Nonsense. The author confuses correlation with causation (employees at Google work long hours, Google makes good products, therefore long hours are needed to produce good products). He also confuses anecdotal and empirical evidence (employees at Google work long hours, therefore this is the norm for successful companies). Anecdotal evidence is notoriously misleading; that's why control groups and large sample sizes are so important in science. The author also doesn't account for factors other than productivity. Even assuming a company with a 5 day work week is more productive on average, it doesn't matter if the 4-day companies are more successful at attracting good programmers. A good programmer working for 4 days is going to be productive than an average programmer working for 5 days (and there is empirical evidence for this). Employee turnover isn't touched either, or motivation, which are two huge things to deal with for any company that employs highly-skilled people. Finally, the majority of development work is spent not bashing away at a keyboard, but instead spent thinking about problems. If you're interested in maximising the productivity of skilled developers, you want to give them environments that encourage creative thought. Keeping them in an office for 5 days a week doesn't seem like something that would encourage this. |