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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

If I were manager I would not even imply that I’m time aware either way, unless there is an ongoing issue (someone staying too late often), (or someone who is not putting in an effort). Otherwise why even bring up your consciousness of time? It signals you’re tracking it one way or another.

Edit: for addressing burnout, overwork, etc., for me personally I would start with bringing up the issue in team meetings.

Do we have enough resources, does anyone feel they’ve got too many tasks; remind everyone (no singling out) that we’re not here to be superheroes, we’re here to work in exchange for compensation and that you need a good work-life balance in order to perform well at work. If it continues to be an issue after several proclamations, then I could address individuals one on one.

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I'm a manager. Why bring this up? To watch for people working too much and potential burn out. If people are working excessively, that's not good for them or the company. I want to be able to rely on people. That means knowing how much they can do. This means if they are putting in extra hours now, I come to expect that level of output from them. This is not fair to them, and not fair for the company. I don't want them burning out. I don't want them feeling as if they have to work excessive hours.

This is also why I actively encourage taking time as needed and being flexible when it comes to taking time off to take care of things during the day. It's a non-issue. Finally, it's why I pay attention to taking vacations. I actively encourage it. Often people feel the pressure of deadlines which are always looming. Through my actions, they don't feel as if they can never take time off.

Yes, I can see how you might feel if someone is watching your work hours. But it's not a single thing. It's a continuous effort and comes from a relationship you develop with the people you manage.

When I ask people why they are still working at a certain time, they know why I'm asking. The net result has been really positive for my team.

As a non-manager I'd like to add it also normalizes healthy work hours to all the employees. I've worked places where one or two devs outpaced everyone else by a fair margin because of the hours they put in. They're usually very skilled developers, but they're also putting in double the hours of anyone else. Management of course always praises their output and calls them "rockstars" or something, while ignoring the fact that they were in the office until 9pm every day this week and have dozens of commits in the past month that occured on Saturdays from Noon to 3AM.

Ignoring my personal feelings of how unhealthy I think this is for them in the long run, I just simply don't want to feel like I'm competing with them. And yeah not all workplaces feel like a competition, but in my experience the places where you constantly hear "I was up until 10 fixing that bug, but I finally solved it." "Nice work, rockstar!" do feel very competitive internally.

Also as someone with lots of anxiety (which I feel is somewhat common among developers) it really helps to hear that taking reasonable hours or a vacation is not only allowed, but encouraged. I worked at a place that switched to "unlimited vacation", but the process for getting it approved was so stressful that the majority of the developers didn't take a vacation that year.

At the same time if they're willing to do 60 hours a week of work (not if it takes them 60 hours to do 40 hours worth of work) they should probably be pointed out positively in the team meeting for putting the effort in, and privately told that it's probably not maintainable in the long term, and if they need to work that much to meet their objectives they have too much work.

But I don't see anything wrong with praising more output under the right circumstances. Everything ebbs and flows. As an IC there are times I go 3-4 days without a single commit. And there are times I have commits for 12 days straight because I'm on a roll.

I've been fighting for an "unlimited with minimum" vacation policy for the developers at my current job for a while now. It was fight to get the base increased from 2 weeks to 3, and the system doesn't allow negative PTO balances, which seems kind of draconian to me. But I'd love to see my coworkers taking 4-5 weeks a year.

So glad I live in a country with sane labor laws. We have mandated 4 weeks vacation, most places have 5 weeks. The law actually says that the employee is mandated to take 4 weeks vacation and the employer is mandated to make sure the employee takes their vacation. It's possible to "transfer" vacation days from one year to the next, but most people take their vacation every year. Looking forward to July off.

As someone with a tendency to accidentally work 60 hour weeks sometimes because I genuinely enjoy the work, I think you have to balance any praise with very clear expectations for the rest of the team. Something like "40 hour weeks are meant to be the norm and while heroism is appreciated, it is not sustainable".

Yeah, this reminds me of when I first got out of college: I worked at a small company and I never took vacations. After a couple years of never taking a vacation day, the owner started 'forcing' me to take vacations by paying for hotel and airfare to anywhere I wanted.

I've done it. My reason was to say I care about their work-life balance as much as mine, and they're performing well and it's okay to take it a little easier. My worry (and sometimes clear perception) is that they're working long hours from a place of anxiety about the progress they're making. So you tell them they're performing well and that they don't need to stay so late.

Likewise with vacations.

I hate whenever I get asked by a manager if I've got enough work. Usually I can say yes and they move on but sometimes I know that I'm supposed to say no and accept whatever new task they want to add to my backlog (along with the expectation that the new task is most important). It usually happens with the management that are not totally aware of all of my responsibilities and what I'm currently working on. They see what little I'm doing on one project and ask for more of my time, yet I'm already working nearly full-time on other projects. I know when it's about to happen too. It will occur during a meeting when my functional manager isn't in the room and a program manager sees a task that they don't want to handle themselves. It's usually a task that's been on their backlog for a while. Their eyes light up, they turn to me, and say "Hey, are you busy?"

I really do appreciate being given enough work to keep me busy, it's better than being laid off. But I really hate being given all the extra junk that no one else wants to do simply because I'm not 100% full time on that project.

It happens that you work overtime sometimes because of such extra tasks? More than 40h/week?

Agreed. If I was at an environment where people were regularly nagged about working past 3:30, it would indirectly make me feel like I had to be an early bird, and was looked down on if I wasn't.

I wonder if ppl got paid per hour, beyond a minimum say 20h week, then everyone could do what they wanted

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