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This is true in offices too. Anyone in knowledge work claiming to consistently work 10 hours a day either does way too much busywork or is lying.

That's a strong claim: that human capacity for working hours at the outliers never exceeds by more than 25% what the average has converged upon.

The average that real knowledge workers work per today is probably closer to 6, including meetings.

I did a simple poll of HN a while back. Here is the result: https://imgur.com/qdSltlM

It's a normal distribution around 4-8 hours. There's no correlation with hours worked to seniority.

Poll language here: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1

I specifically included meetings, etc, in the time counted.

If you took anecdotes from office workers IRL you'd think everyone was in the top quintile. You can argue that its an unrepresentative sample (people browsing HN) but I'd postulate that people not on HN are using downtime elsewhere.

And I'm not convinced the 8+ people are being more productive with their time (as per my busy work note in the other comment). Anecdotally, the people who most complain about being busy seem to be the least impactful.

Wrong imgur link? Shows a random image dump here.

Fixed!

OK, so that's a strong claim, that outliers can't work 1.5 times as much as normal. I've worked in GameDev and now science... I've seen them, they exist! Some people work not just harder but longer as well, they are extremely productive compared to average.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Richard Hamming says:

You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it.

> Some people work not just harder but longer as well, they are extremely productive compared to average.

Not for long. Overworking always rewards you with burnout.

I've only ever felt burnout when I didn't enjoy the job.

I once worked at a job I didn't really enjoy, and I worked 8 hours during the day and often 4 hours coding on my side projects. What's the difference between that and coding 12 hours doing something you love?

I have some experience in it: I was working day-and-night on my own projects at the beginning of my career - gave me a lot of money and experience, but now I know for sure that I could do it with just 20% of efforts - all my best things were written/built after some long rest periods (more than week of rest). All that experience I could learn just in a few weeks but I was too stupid to spend some of my time to read what other people do - I was reinventing all the wheels.

After that I was working in a company, 14-16 hours per day, 6 days per week. After 2 years of such work, at the end of the day I had to spend 5-15 seconds to remember names of my wife and son, my address.

So I decided to never work more than 8 hours per day, preferably less. And you know what? My earnings increased, my relationships with employers are much better now, my health is MUCH better. So I can say for sure - overworking is a waste of lifetime and gives nothing.

Good for you. Hamming worked long hours, neglected his wife and now there's a function named after him in every scientific library running billions of times a day.

Nobody should be forced to work long hours but if they want to, and it works for them - go for it I say.

How do you know he neglected his wife? I found that they did not had children, but could not find anything else about his personal life.

Hamming quote in post 5 ancestors back:

I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes

And he might've achieved that regardless. Study after study finds people have about 6 productive hours a day in them.

that's a strong claim, that outliers can't work 1.5 times as much as normal

Imagine you truly were an outlier. One of those 10x guys. If you were that good, why would you choose to work more hours? So you could get 15 times as much done in that one day instead of just 10?

Put the way you did, the natural conclusion to draw would be that outliers would be the guys getting their thing done in fewer hours, while the average guys trying to fake it would need to stay late.

> why would you choose to work more hours?

Because you have a neuro-atypicality that means you prefer to stick with one thing for many hours.

My observation is that teams that work long hours are typically disorganized and there are many sudden changes and interruptions.

Neuro-atypicality that means you prefer to stick with one thing for many hours usually have you preferring routine and well organized predictable structure.

>stay late.

Stay where?

>> why would you choose to work more hours?

Because you have a high drive and are intrinsically motivated. Because you find your job satisfying, want to get rich, famous or make a life saving discovery etc.

In my opinion burnout comes from working long hours in a job you don't really care about. There are plenty of people who don't burn out from working hard, they just have really unbalanced lives.

Enterprise is 80% busywork. It’s really easy to hit 10 hours a day.

That relevant "Compiling" xkcd comes to mind :)

I am working remote for 3 and a half years now. Meeting the "week by week" expectations is the most important thing, period.

The fundamental problem with scrum is that bugs happen and nothing interesting from a development point of view can be predicted effort wise before hand, at least not accurately.

The right way, is to do all velocity analysis backward-looking. Create a culture where code reviews are done constantly and long after they've been merged in.

Use metrics like KLOC, duplicate lines of code, changes to code, stories completed, etc. That's the way to measure velocity. Measuring done done done by end of sprint, is really wasteful as some engineers get it into their head to pad their estimates to make sure it's completed by some arbitrary date. This just leads to a culture of padding estimates rather than completing work when it's done.

That said, I do like letting engineers pull tasks as they like. If a more senior engineer in a certain area can complete a task better and more thoughtfully, than he should have a chance to pull it.

This also does require technical PMs which can discuss and understand the cost of their stories. This is important regardless however.

I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.

You just need to embrace async communication even with one remote worker. In short: all relevant problems/design/communication solved on project channel and not offline or private coversations.

I've been the only remote worker on a team in the past, and it was a horrible experience. Ways you might be able to avoid that:

- Treat communications as a first-class management consideration for yourself and every team member. Make sure your team gets the message.

- Treat telecommunications issues, especially the quality of teleconference calls, as a top-level issue. Otherwise the remote worker will, again, be at an information disadvantage. He/she will have to choose between (a) repeatedly asking everyone in the meeting to repeat themselves, move closer to the mic, adjust the camera orientation, etc., or (b) miss some potentially important communication.

- Remember that every fun perk for physically present staff (going out to lunch together, having an after-hours beer, etc.) runs the risk of making the remote worker feel left out and not an integral member of the team. Treat this as a management problem.

If these problems are manifest, not only will you suffer the direct implications of missed communications, but you're likely to face a disengaged worker, which is fun for nobody.

I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.