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Comment by thunderbong | Hacker News Reader

Looks like you're drawing conclusions from the title, which I also did!

Per the article, he's not saying you should work on the project during office hours. Instead, to get feedback from users, he's allocating some time where users can have a talk with him about the project. He's calling that 'Office Hours'.

I think that it's a really valuable suggestion.

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I don't understand what you're saying. How is time spent gathering feedback from users not time spent working on the project?

I think you're missing the distinction between "office hours" (what most people would read as 9-5 Monday through Friday) and "Office Hours", the term Simon is using to describe the 4-5 hours a week that he specifically allocates to having discussions with his users. Which is completely understandable given that there's not actually a consistent capitalisation difference.

Of course the latter is still time spent working on the project, but it's certainly not in direct conflict with having a full-time job paying the bills.

It's more like office hours in the college sense where you go talk to the prof/ta to get your doubts cleared and stuff, the way i see it.

Ah, I see what you mean. People generally wouldn't say "run office hours" to refer to the first sense. That might be "work office hours" or "standard office hours" or "keep office hours" perhaps.

The article describes a practice for gathering feedback for your project: announce a set time when people can get on a call with you for a few minutes and discuss your project. The author calls this "office hours".

It's a useful piece of advice for people who are in need of such feedback, and can afford to block off a bit of time on their schedule on a regular basis. It doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a good trick if it does apply to you.

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