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by ttoinou 6 days ago
In which world do you live where employees work 8 hours per day ? They clock 8 hours per day maybe, but they don't work that time
6 comments

I had a friend who was CEO of a startup tell me that he typically only “worked” an hour a day, not because he was lazy but just because there was so much nonsense in his schedule. He told me he was trying to get it to two hours per day.
How successful did he turn out to be? As a CEO your days should be jam packed with brutal "chewing glass and gazing into the abyss". Is he running a lifestyle type company?
Tangential, but all companies are lifestyle companies, in the sense that they serve their owner's lifestyle choices.

It's just that lots of owners want a company that pulls them away from all other areas of life.

Quite successful. Tech company.
This reads like compensation theatrics.
I agree with you.

I am on Dutch subreddits a lot, to get a local pulse and not to be too HN minded.

A lot of them would have vilified you by now. Some even would have even questioned your morality.

Again, I agree with you. But clearly not everyone has this view.

In theory, ofc. But that doesn't matter. If you were doing something that took 2 days in average, but you were doing it in half the time, then that was fine pre LLMs. Nowadays your manager knows that with LLMs you need to deliver faster no matter what, and then it's more difficult to "hide" and to slack.
Yeah. So, good things. We ack know that people are mostly slacking at work
Generally, when people say they are working 8h/day, they don't literally mean it. Even "work" is basically impossible to define for a SWE.
Some companies force you to actually work 8 hours a day. It’s hell.
Which country and which companies ?
E.g. factory work
Oh yeah its not the same, we were discussing Agentic AI
I worked at a software company that made screenshot of your screen every minute. I also worked a non-software white collar job where you were expected to work non-stop for 8 hours, except for an unpaid lunch break.
How did you accept such jobs ? I would never be able to pull this off as an employer
The problem is that there are people willing to accept these conditions. Think higher of your self worth in future please.
Here’s my hot take as an elder millennial. Boomers are the absolute worst at being unable to make the distinction between time at work and time doing work. They may show up an hour before everyone else but spend the first two or three hours a day, reading the news and getting coffee and making small talk and accomplishing literally nothing. Then crow about their work ethic.