[ukigumo]

My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend to care".

In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for.

In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.

Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.

I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

[engi_nerd]

US engineer here. Agreed on not wanting to start a "war". Allow me to share the rationale that my manager in a previous job shared with me.

This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote immediately after the incident.

"engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for a promotion."

I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.

[ToastyMallows]

Good on you. I would refuse to work at any company that places such ridiculous standards on its employees. I'm surprised you even stayed for 4 months I would have been out of there much sooner.

[engi_nerd]

It took that long to get to where I wanted to be -- I had to arrange to sell a house and move, etc. But the actual "find a new job" process took a single email to a key member of my professional network.

It pays to know good people.

[ToastyMallows]

That it does! Glad you're out of there.

[ryguytilidie]

That sounds a lot like the "pieces of flair" from office space.

[ukigumo]

That sounds like a horrible place to work and the arguments are complete nonsense.

To me, and maybe I'm just too cynical, but it sounds like the manager was telling you that the company needed 50% of your work to be off the books in order for them to meet expectations which is a sign of a poorly managed company. But then again it makes sense since, according to him, only people who show no capacity to self-manage, prioritise or delegate get promoted.

I think you did well in leaving that job, good on you!

[engi_nerd]

What makes this story a little more ridiculous (and funnier to tell) is that we were all employed in the business of designing and launching scientific research rockets.

The phrase "it's not rocket science" has a whole new meaning for me now.

[Already__Taken]

Is that researching the science of rockets or using rockets to put research things where they need to be?

[engi_nerd]

The latter.

[Anthony-G]

Fair play to you. That's some shockingly explicit wage theft. Thankfully, skilled workers (such as most Hacker News readers / contributors) usually have other options and don't have to accept such nasty work conditions.

BTW, I'm impressed that you're organised enough to keep notes on such exchanges after they happen; memory alone is too damn unreliable.

[engi_nerd]

I was taking notes because I believed that my manager was unfairly trying to make a case to fire me. Background, if anyone might be interested...

I was proven right two days before I handed in my resignation letter, when said manager called me to the carpet and informed me in very direct terms that he thought I was an extremely poor engineer and was not going to last long without an attitude adjustment. I believe that my refusal to work overtime, as well as my refusal to comply with management directives I found to be unethical, was what triggered that conversation.

The unethical acts they wanted me (and all my fellow engineers to do): work on one mission while billing time to another, which is illegal while working on US government contracts, and tell ISO auditors that we were following our engineering redlining process while actually following a secret, different process that was not officially released in our document management system.

Not going to prison for you, nor am I compromising my professional ethics.

[api]

Wow. That is legally questionable.

[supercanuck]

The problem is the definition of work. Last night I was at a Wine Bar in Houston with Clients and Colleagues from 5:30 to 9:30.

Was it billable? No. Was it paid for? Yes. Does it have work value? Yes. Is it "technically" work? Maybe. Did I have a good time? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't think there was business value to it? Absolutely not.

[mcdougle]

That's not always the case, though. I have a friend who works in public accounting who actually does work 80-hour weeks during busy season (i.e. just before taxes are due) and spends pretty much that whole time in the office from what I understand.

[supercanuck]

Knowledge work is so diversified now, it would be impossible to capture everyone. I was just providing an anecdote as someone who sympathized with the article.

[afarrell]

How much does he work outside of March and April?

[mcdougle]

The standard 40 hour week

quick edit: he works with businesses, too, so he does 80 hour weeks in Oct/Nov. and again in Mar/Apr. and then 40 hour weeks the rest of the year.

[smileysteve]

A lot of the major accounting agencies have a 2 week break around christmas because they expect tax season to be busy.

[ukigumo]

Well, I would classify it as work because it was a social interaction with a comercial intent.

If you were a contractor you could probably justify those expenses as part of your activity because it's culturally acceptable to engage in alcohol consumption with work relationships and you were representing your company while doing so.

[rhino369]

>I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

In short bursts, I think the diminishing returns of long hours is sorta overblown. Over the long term, 16 hour days will wear you down and destroy you.

I work in a big law and 16 hour days are too common. But people are successfully managing billion dollar deals and litigation while doing 16 hours fairly often.

But over a long period of time it takes a toll emotionally and physically.

One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.

[ukigumo]

>One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.

I think you've hit a pretty good point straight in the head here. The article also seems to focus on a consulting company which very likely sells man-hour packages so it is on their best interest to have "heroes".

[Someone1234]

The US on the other hand has marked almost everyone who uses a keyboard "overtime exempt[0]."

[0] https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-pro...

[e40]

In CA some people won't meet the salary requirement, which is somewhere around $90K/yr. Also, all administrative and many sales staff, who use keyboards extensively, are exempt (except at VP and up level).

[s73v3r]

Unfortunately the state of California doesn't check for this. So many companies still do it, and likely get away with it.

[e40]

An EDD audit will be expensive, then. It happens. It often happens because people rat out their employer.

[rhizome]

It was over 100K about 7 yrs ago when I looked into it, so unless there's been an adjustment since then...

On that note, if you want to challenge your exempt status, you must have a record of your hours that you are going to try to claim on.

[kamaal]

>>do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

It depends on what you are working on, how important that is, how interesting it is and what is at stake. There have been instances when I could do long hours which just come naturally out of the flow. Other times, its difficult to get by the day and I long to see 5:00 on the watch.

Having said that most of the burnouts and hatred towards long working are caused due to resentment. I have seen people used and thrown like tissues for the well being of political cartels within companies.

Overall I think this is the largest flaw in Humans. Else if we had any appreciation for meritocracy we would all be living in space colonies by now. A lot of talent and work is lost because a few hardworking are making up for every one else. And with rewards continuously being stolen by the thieves in the political cartels, there is a little incentive for anybody genuine to stay up and contribute.

Conclusion is people don't like to work hard when they get nothing in return. This situation is starving the whole world ecosystem of good work.

[jpmattia]

> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.

[harryf]

In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency .

It's worth watching this talk from the Leading @ Google series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke6X2eME3c

The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.

[ukigumo]

I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.

[ukigumo]

I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them?

As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.

[jpmattia]

> Were their visas tied to their work contract?

No, they held US citizenship. They were just hardworking immigrants.

I'm the grandson of immigrants, which makes me positively lazy by comparison. I pretty much have to knock off after 12 hours these days.

[erikb]

I also have some experience working in Germany and I feel you are right with the hours but that's not the point. Even if everybody wants you to work just 40 hours people still have unreasonably high demands because they don't understand the complexity of the situation they are in (coworkers, bosses, customers all the same). So you still need to find ways to satisfy people without always doing exactly what they have asked for.

[altcognito]

That's just the nature of work though. You'll find that even general contractors do a great deal of pushing back on scope during a project in order to make sure things come in on both cash and time budgets. The only difference is we work in the virtual space which tends to disconnect people from the fact that things still take time.

[erikb]

Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in another comment directly responding to the topic. That's just how work is, or better how life is. You can complain about it or you find a way to handle it. It's not about the 80-hour week but about handling people.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

> local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.

That belief makes too much sense. To be a belief shouldn't there be a contrary believable belief? I wouldn't want to be part of the other retrograde group who believes something else.

[ukigumo]

The contrary belief is what is described in the article, where people are expected to stay in the office, or on-call for long hours to be valued as employees.

The sad thing is how many people actually live like this, defining themselves through what they do instead of who they are.

[ido]

I live in Berlin and a lot of tech companies here (especially startups) expect unpaid overtime. This is in stark contrast to Vienna where I've almost never encountered it.

[ukigumo]

I think it's normal for startups to try to get things for free, be it software or work hours, and that's OK up to a point, but once a company reaches a plateau of business activity and operational maturity then it becomes a sign of poor management that they can't balance workload and workforce.

Out of curiosity, are you German? My experience with German companies was centred in the financial services sector out of Frankfurt and some tech companies out of Munich and overtime was never even suggested so I'm thinking there might also be some differences between the regions.

[ido]

I'm not German, but we've been living in Berlin for about 2 years now and lived in Vienna for almost 8 years before that.

I was even explicitly told by some companies when interviewing that they expect and encourage workers to stay until at least 7-8pm...at least between Berlin and Vienna there is definitely a difference in attitude.

[michaelochurch]

I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive. Long hours don't work. Most Americans know it, and would agree with everything you have to say.

I would generally agree with you, although I don't think that long hours necessarily signify incompetence. In the HBR article, the sense given is that they signify being bad at politics, and therefore find themselves in a position where they sacrifice too much and only get moderate reward. The people who are good at politics figure out how to "pass", how to get full credit for being dedicated without working unsustainable hours.

It's a vicious cycle: people who are bad at politics put their heads down and work 80-hour weeks, and because they're overworked they never learn how the politics of the organization really work (they don't have the time) and, when they inevitably tire of the nonsense and face time, they don't have the political skill to reduce their effort and get away with it, even though they could probably cut their hourage by 50% at least without hurting the company at all.

The counterintuitive reality is that overwork projects low status, in the US as it does in the EU, but so many people are oblivious to the fact and think that "busy" is a good look on them. (It's a good look to other over-busy, mid-level chumps. It doesn't fool the people with actual power.) There are a few jobs in which you simply have to work 90-hour weeks or you'll get fired (e.g. investment banking's analyst programs) and my observations wouldn't apply but, even in the US, they're rare. This isn't like Japan salaryman culture where average people have to work 14-hour days just to stay put. In general, working in a way that lowers your status, emphasizing availability and sacrifice rather than unique skill, tends only to get you more grunt work.

The irony is that, 10 years ago at age 21, these bankers and consultants were, for the most part, way ahead of people like me in terms of social skills. But after 10 years of doing the true-believer thing and working themselves to death, they've gotten to the (surprising) point where they suck at politics.

This is also why I think it's silly that Americans are so averse to learning "office politics". Academically, it's a disgraceful game, but if being halfway good at it saves you 20 hours per week and gets you the same damn reward, it's absolutely worth learning. The truth is that 5 percent of one's reputation as a strong or weak performer is performance, 10 percent is raw (and obvious) politics, and 85% is the politics of performance that looks like merit to true-believer types, but is usually quite game-able. And there's nothing morally wrong with gaming it; it makes a person more likely to reach a high-impact role with his or her capability intact, and that benefits the company as much as the individual.

[nostrademons]

There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole. At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.

There's another game you can play, which is to find organizations (or parts of organizations) where there is a minimum amount of politics to begin with. These are usually younger, high-growth companies filling a real need in the marketplace; because everyone's so busy delivering value to the customer, they don't have time to compete with each other, nor do they need to because the pie's expanding faster than anyone can gobble up a piece of it. As Eric Schmidt liked to say, "More revenue solves all known problems."

The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces. That will bias your selection criteria toward companies which are about to fail in the marketplace, which may not be a winning strategy in the long term.

[michaelochurch]

There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole.

I agree that this conflict of interest exists.

At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.

That, I'm not sure that I buy. Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful. I think that, at some point, companies get to a level where typical political behavior doesn't help them, but won't unhorse them either. Most Fortune 500 companies do just fine at delivering returns to investors and salaries to employees, despite being large and political.

The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces.

Sure, and I don't advise learning only politics. I think that people need to learn enough to solve political problems and to avoid losing fights. (It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.) Ideally, it's best to specialize in something that adds value but learn enough politics to get by, protect the good, and keep one's work from falling into a black hole.

The sad truth, as we'd both agree, is that organizations tend to end up being run by people who specialized in politics itself. That's unfortunate and, given the game-theoretic issues that you already described quite well, I don't see an easy solution. When bodies end up being overwhelmed by individually fit cells that harm the organism we call it "cancer". When corporations' upper ranks are filled with individually fit (politically speaking) people who lack vision or care for the organization, we end up with exactly what you described.

[kbooking]

"(It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.)"

Sage advice from Christ Matthews: "Don't get Mad; Don't get even; Get ahead" https://books.google.com/books?id=Klm4oM20MpMC&pg=PA105&lpg=...

As human beings that evolved for living in smaller tribes, our anger and retribution instinct makes a lot of sense. If you get a reputation for just accepting being walked all over, then your life will be much worse. You need to need have honor, and to defend your honor, and attack those who bully you. But in the modern world, reputation does not travel in the same way. Nor do you have the same tools for defending yourself. Duels became passe long ago. So fighting back often is just net negative to your own interests. When you run into a bad boss, the past option is usually to play along and then plot an escape.

[S4M]

> Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful.

Those large tech companies have put some solid barriers to enter in their markets before being run by politics. I suspect nostrademons is suggesting to work in a new sector, where there is no clear leader and no entry cost: any startup has a chance to win. However in this case one has to sell the products, make some partnerships, market one's company, etc. which might involve politics, but outside the company.

[strictnein]

> "European countries are more productive"

Not really true. Only 2-3 European countries are more productive in terms of GDP per hour worked. Varies based on dataset: [0] [1]

[0] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL [1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

And we're talking European countries with the populations of smaller US states. Luxembourg, Norway, and Ireland.

[bakhy]

All three can be explained away :D Norway = oil, Luxemburg & Ireland = tax havens. The GDP-based worker productivity definition is pretty useless, IMO.

[hueving]

>American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive.

Do you have a citation for this? I've heard it before but I'm curious where it comes from.

[Someone]

There are huge differences in work force that make such comparisons as good as useless.

For example, the jobs for people who put your stuff in paper bags at Walmart do not exist in large parts of Western Europe, and doormen are way rarer. In general, the USA has more low-paying, low productivity jobs than Western Europe. That lowers average productivity for the USA.

Also, measuring productivity is hard. You can't look at pay, as that can be quite different for exactly the same work (you can get a suit made in Asia for peanuts, but that doesn't mean people working there aren't productive)

So, you scale for _something_: average income (before or after taxes), hamburger index, or whatever. In the end, it will be very, very hard, if not impossible, to do that objectively. If the outcome of your procedure differs by a large factor from what you expect, you will search for errors in your logic. If it matches what you expect, it is hard to keep searching as hard.

[hueving]

Is there not some comparison of two similar roles and metrics for those roles? (e.g. an engineering firm in the US produces specs for a bridge in X person-hours vs the Y person-hours it takes a firm in the UK.)

[Someone]

Define 'similar'. Do both firms have to go through the same amount of red tape? If not, is time spent doing extra calculations showing the safety of the bridge productive time or bureacratic overhead?

You _can_ let both design a bridge according to the same rule set, but to measure how hard teams work and not how fast they can do that task, you have to make sure both have equal experience with that rule set (US engineers will likely be faster at designing a U.S. bridge than UK engineers, and vice versa)

To make a truly fair comparison of efficiency of working, you probably will end up with an exercise where both teams design a bridge that will never get built. Possible? Yes, but also expensive.

[mreiland]

I can say I'm just oblivious enough that I probably wouldn't have learned that lesson had I stayed doing the normal work thing. I freelance so I have my own set of politics to deal with, but the change in perspective is enough to view the politics as something other than detrimental.

But I've never really thought about office politics in those terms, thank you for the enlightening post.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Ok so how do you learn to play politics?

[skizm]

> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

A lot of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft's employees all seem to put in long hours and are productive with the extra time. Amazon on the other hand is one of the companies with a lot of people "pretending" to work long hours. I was looking into these companies when applying to jobs and that was a sense I got at least.