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Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

When you say "finish our jobs", what does that mean?

Does it mean that you have been assigned too much work to finish in 8 hours, and if you don't finish the work you'll be fired? If so, that sounds like you are overworked and exploited.

Does it mean that all of your competitors are also working 12 hours days, so in the fight-to-the-bottom a single company can't reduce the work hours without fear the competition will overtake them? If so, then a law which requires 8 hours, or 6 hours, will get rid of that competition.

Are any of your competitors from countries which mandate an 8 hour work day? The US exempts programmers from that requirement, as I recall. If so, how do they manage?

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Yes it is overworked or exploited. But the work is not forced at all but you end up extending yourself If you want to be at the top of the stack .And my counter parts who work in US also ends up working definitely more than 8 hours.Another thing I noticed is that many of these people enjoy the challenging but time consuming work at least during the initial days.

If you aren't forced, then why not leave after 8 hours?

I asked for a definition. You answered with more undefined terms. What does "top of the stack" mean? Is it the total number of hours worked? How do you establish who is at the top, and why is it important to you?

Not, why is it important to the company, but why do you personally want to work an additional 4 hours per day to get to the top of this stack?

Once you've answered that, you should be aware that the many studies of learning say there's only about 4 hours of real skills acquisition or creative work possible per day, for the long term. And that past 8 hours your productivity decreases, and people start going to work so the body is present, but they end up doing other things instead, from paying bills to playing videogames to commenting on HN.

Things they could easily do at home. While videogames and HN are fun, what of those who find cycling, dancing, or hanging out at the bar more fun? Why should the company control your free time?

My bad, Top of the stack is in regard to performance.Stack ranking is present in every company even though it is not said so.I thought it is a generic term for perfornance comparison. I seriously don't think the 4 hours per day study is relevant for my line of work or a typical Manager's work.I work on multiple work items a day in that only two or three requires high concentration like debugging or writing code and rest is simply time consuming like reviewing others work,meetings,writing documentations etc.That needs time

This confirms what I said. Your continued employed is partially based on the amount of free time you donate to the company.

And you don't have a problem with that?

Also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve and the companies (Microsoft, Adobe, others) which have abandoned stack rancking.

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