[retrogradeMT]

It seems that the answer should be, at least in the shot term, for good managers to recognize the 40 hours "available" concept and provide more flexible schedules. No one gains from having an office full of workers surfing Facebook on friday afternoon. Let people be someplace else if it their queue is empty.

From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.

[xanderstrike]

> From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.

As someone on the outside, hearing horror stories about mandatory 14 hour days and regularly working nights and weekends for startups I'd think they were doing it much worse. It's one of the things that has steered me away from working for a recent startup because I refuse to work more than 8 hours a week.

I had an interview at a startup where I asked the interviewer to take me through my average day at the company. He basically said I'd arrive at 8:30 and leave at 6:30 or 7, sometimes later. I told him that to maintain a healthy work/life balance I would be leaving at 5pm every day and asked him his opinion on that. He said it would be technically acceptable since they can't force you to work more than 8 hours, but would be heavily looked down upon. I didn't take the job.

[JimboOmega]

I was surprised to find so much discussion around the concept of the 15-20 hour actual productive week here, because Hacker News is such a startup friendly environment.

I've often seriously questioned if I'm cut out for startups because of the relatively low number (much less than 40) of productive hours I put in when things are not pressing at regular jobs.

[retrogradeMT]

Perhaps "better than most" isn't the right way to say it. My less than clear point was that there is less idle time at a startup than in traditional offices and when you don't have anything to do you do not need to be in the office.

I could also just be making a bad assumption.

[shkkmo]

Except what seems to actually be happening in some cases is "40 hours onsite" and "available 24/7 via email"