The 6-hour workday
blog.ezlearnz.com
blog.ezlearnz.com
At my startup, I'm paying people a regular (8-hour) salary for working a 6-hour day. The company gets value out of mental focus, not in having an ass in a chair-- so, if people are more focused and motivated with an extra two hours available for other activities (family, friends, what have you) then it is a net gain for the company.
The problem I've seen is that most of the 2 hours of wasted time happen randomly throughout the day; it's not concentrated at the end. So when you simply cut the day off 2 hours earlier, how much real work are you cutting out?
Also, if it's a startup, don't you expect people to work until things are finished? Why create a specific time range per day?
Note that I'm not arguing that there is 2 hours wasted in an average day-- rather, I'm arguing that a) mental clarity trumps hours on the job, and b) more time for personal pursuits will lead to more mental clarity at work.
As for the latter question, I expect people to get things done-- but in terms of deciding which things we expect to get done by which date, we need to take some "expected hours per day" into account.
I'm uncomfortable with the idea that not paying employees what they're worth will have a net benefit. You should pay your employees well in whatever ways you can reasonably do it (money, benefits, stake in the company, perks, even softer things like respect, trust, etc.) Compensating them with free time doesn't make any sense. They have just as much time as you do, and it's theirs to spend.
The startup = sweatshop mentality really needs to end if we're to see a higher success rate among startups.
In every case that I've seen people working insanely long hours trying to get some piece of code working, it's turned out to be bad code.
Sweatshops provide the illusion of increasing the development pace, but the reality is the opposite. What you're doing in those situations isn't rushing to market, it's repeating the mistakes that lead to the term Microserf.
Most projects fail miserably. Microsoft's software succeed in spite of it's quality (that is, the lack thereof), not because of it.
Personally, if I were running company, I'd end up firing the people working the insane hours; I wouldn't want to be paying their technical debt down the road.
And incidentally, Joel Spolsky has mentioned this as well. People working insane hours do bad work. They rack up technical debt that the company will end up paying, usually indefinitely.
At the end of the day, er, performance-review period, either you've created value for your employer that justifies the salary they paid you, or you haven't. If you did, why should the employer care whether you did the job in 6, 8, or 10 hours per day? If you didn't, then some kind of remedial action needs to be taken, and the action is not necessarily "do what you were doing before, but for more hours". And if the employer can't gauge the value of an employee's contribution without referring to how many hours per week the employee showed up, then the employer has bigger problems.
This will add overhead by always keeping everyone on track with specific tasks, but it's definitely worth it (think Scrum/Agile).
Doesn't Best Buy do this?
Yes, that is exactly what this is, until I am able to put it into practice and see if it works. I say this as the author of the blog post.
>... and that has no bearing with a real workplace?
Well, in my experience (at least at the place where I work), everyone could be just as productive in 6 hours as 8 (or 9, or 10), if they knew they could go home afterwards.
I'd be surprised if any knowledge worker averages MORE than 6 hours work a day so why should they be bound to the office for eight?
Well, I'm not trying to put you down, but your thoughts on this subject are pretty worthless until you can put them in practice. "How to structure a workplace" is one of those extremely complex topics that require many years of practical experience to get right, and that present countless options that look alright at first glance but turn out to be disastrous.
This is very similar to the problem of scaling applications to millions of users. Would you take advice about that from someone who hasn't actually gone and scaled at least one, but ideally several applications to that kind of scale? No, because even though their theoretical solution might sound alright, it has no substantiation to confirm that it actually has a snowflake's chance in hell to work out in real life.
The problem with your article is that it is just day-dreaming, but you present it as if it was some sort of tested solution. In fact, it is just day-dreaming, applied to a subject that many extremely bright people have been studying and working in for about a hundred years. That subject is called "Management", for your information. Certainly there is room for improvement, but until you actually have experience of the subject and have proven that your ideas actually work, they are effectively worthless.
I'm not the original poster, but I commented above my assent-- at my last start-up, we went with the traditional 8-hour day, but at my new one (where I am just beginning to hire people) I'll be using a 6-hour day (at the same salaries I used to pay people for 8.) Based on my practical experience in hiring and managing dozens of people at my last company, I'm making this decision-- I'll let you know how it turns out, once the data is in.
This kind of system, in our case, is not the result of idle day-dreaming, however, but of about 15 years' worth of combined experiences working for other companies and seeing what works and what doesn't, and reading masses of literature on the subject. That makes it very different from simply saying "Oh, I think I'd work just as well with fewer working hours, and hey, it might even give some benefits" - which is just idle chatter and not worthy of an article, imho.
"Gosh, guys. There are 10 search engines out there with pretty good market share that have been iterating and improving their code/algorithms for YEARS. A "search engine" is one of those extremely complex businesses that requires years of practical experience to get right-- your "pagerank" concept looks alright at first glance but could turn out to be disastrous."
Dramatic innovation can come from iteration and experience or it can come from unlikely sources (as startups prove over and over again).
Personally, I think the OP's article is full of ideas that I decidedly don't agree with... But there are a vast pile of ridiculous ideas I didn't agree with in the past that turned out to be right.
The concepts outlined in the OP are very basic, not ground-breaking at all. There is no hint of a reason why the OP should be even remotely believable. The whole thing sounds like puerile wishful thinking.
To me, what it sounds like is a child designing his ideal car with an ice cream dispenser, and seeing how oh-my-god, it could also be used as an ice cream truck - win-win!..
That's what I was criticising. Harsh, perhaps - maybe even excessively so - but fair.