[AnimalMuppet]

But they actually aren't leaving productivity on the table. This isn't an assembly line. Crunching makes you tired, and your brain slows down when you're tired. You wind up doing the same work in a 10-hour day that you would have done in an 8-hour day.

Extreme programming (XP) was all about going as fast as you can. One of the rules was, "Never work overtime for more than one week in a row." Why? Because when you're tired, you slow down. When you're tired, stop. Go home. Get some sleep. Come back tomorrow with a brain that isn't tired.

[steveBK123]

Yes, and I'd add further - this is knowledge work. Creating a mentally/emotional safe environment is going to enhance productivity more than shouting at people.

Shouting at a team is a good way to burn a day of productivity and months of built up good will. This should be obvious, and yet I still see about 20% of managers do it.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Crunching makes you tired, and your brain slows down when you're tired.

Sure, but management doesn't care about the health of the workers, they care about line going up, for them workers are replaceable cogs. If people are too slow and tired from crunch, then it's their problem, so you put them on pip then fire them and replace them with fresh hires. Rinse and repeat. It is only a problem for them, if they manage to burn through all their cogs and have no more replacements. But then there's immigration and visas.

I've seen this twice already where I worked.

Wasn't Japan the country where people even die from overwork? If management saw this as a problem, surely they would have put an end to it by now and give workers there a French/Danish work-life balance instead to increase their productivity, but it seems like that's not how companies view productivity.

[AnimalMuppet]

Let's suppose I was a manager who only cared about line go up. And let's suppose I was able to think about second-order effects. What would I do?

I would care about not burning out my programmers. Burned-out programmers program slower, not faster. Slower doesn't make line go up. Sure, I could get faster... for a week, maybe two. After that it's counterproductive. If I don't really need it, right now, then I shouldn't do it.

Same thing with workers leaving. Sure, I could hire more, but training costs. I spent a lot of money getting the ones I have now to learn what's going on well enough to be effective. If I care about line go up, I don't want to lose those people.

Extreme Programming (XP) was all about going as fast as possible. One of their rules was "Never work overtime longer than one week in a row." Why? Because programming isn't an assembly line. Tired people miss things. They write more bugs. They just work slower. If you want to go as fast as possible, be rested. When you're tired, go home. Get some sleep. Come back with a brain that works.

Look, a decent human being should have some empathy for other human beings. But even a manager with no empathy whatsoever, if they understand, still shouldn't be making their programmers work crunch time except in very short, rare amounts.

The problem isn't just managers who only care about line go up. It's managers who do so in a clueless way.

[franktankbank]

No you'd just outsource to India and cycle through as many billions of souls needed.

[AnimalMuppet]

You'd still have to bring each new hire up to speed. Still not a smart plan.

[disgruntledphd2]

Generally people forget to consider replacement and training costs as reasons to be kind to your current employees.

I've basically never seen this happen in my career (although I live in hope).

[steveBK123]

Not sure why this got downvoted, management really does not care about your health. They may say things out of social niceties, but they really do not care. Maybe if it causes their cost share of your healthcare plan to go up they might, but not really.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Not sure why this got downvoted

Because HN doesn't like comments that are blunt about harsh realities, they like a warm tone that coddles and softens the facts.

>They may say things out of social niceties, but they really do not care.

My favorite part is when companies pretend to tackle burnouts with giving their workers subscriptions to yoga or mindfulness apps, instead of you know, the sane thing that actually works, which is less workload and a less toxic work environment.

> Maybe if it causes their cost share of your healthcare plan to go up they might, but not really.

Would be nice if that were the case. I live in a country with universal healthcare, so all the externalities of burnouts get socialized from the private system to the state healthcare and welfare systems, not to the employers. It's incredibly rare that an employer here is reprimanded against stress induced onto the workers. Only if there's hard evidence proving the employer is the cause, or an employee kills themselves you might see the state looking into it and fining the employer.

[steveBK123]

I've also noticed, especially in the last 6 months, any threads going too far in questioning paymasters here quickly gets downvoted/filtered/disappeared off main page quite quickly.