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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

Irrelevant detail: if he lives in NZ and works on California time, California's 9AM happens at 4AM his time, and California's 5PM is his 12 noon. At least with the current clock with daylight savings.

Seems like a sweet gig, wake up early, finish by lunch time.

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As a senior executive the wall time really doesn't matter to his output or work. He is expected and very likely making decisions and working/replying to issues all hours he is awake. He isn't being measured on something like 'amount of code committed', he's being measured by how effective his entire organization is performing. People in his org are relying on him to be the arbiter and decision maker that unblock and move forward the organization.

I've always wondered this about senior execs. As an IC I could easily unplug at 5p every day. Now, as a manager of managers I have to force myself to unplug for a couple hours each night to maintain some sanity but I'm always thinking and noodling about work in some capacity when I'm awake. I can no longer tell whether this is due to how the pandemic has changed work culture or whether it was always like this. But I imagine senior execs who run orgs spanning thousands of engineers are always plugged in, even if they're great at delegating.

Yes. Not a senior exec myself but worked as an exec assistant with glorified title for a couple and they were plugged in at any time, all days (Sunday a bit less). Their only balance was a slightly more generous leave (about 2 months per year). Some of the work is a bit less taxing, lots of meetings, calls with interesting people, as long as things are going well. Some is really boring administrative work. I was doing the boring parts that I could, and was a fly on the wall for the rest, and still they could not delegate most of it to me or others just by the nature of it.

Thanks for the insight -- I have never seen an exec take more than 3-4 weeks per year though. Did they ever take the full two months in your experience?

Yes, 1 month and 2*2 weeks.

I work roughly those hours (from NZ) - the time difference is 3-5 hours depending on time of year

Of course you've forgotten that dateline - Monday here is Sunday in the US

I worked from Dubai last year for about a month. My company is on GMT-5/GMT-4, and Dubai is GMT+4. Their weekend is Friday/Saturday. So working remotely, I was working on nights before both days off. It wasn't a great schedule (but I didn't care because COVID made everything boring).

I wouldn't want to wake up before dawn.

I solve this by taking an afternoon nap - that lets me live reasonably comfortably in two timezones

If he has to communicate with Europe (Switzerland?) That's going to be impossible

I wonder if NZ being a day ahead would be a drag. Certainly I think a 5 hour time zone swing is doable. Annoying, but doable. I did a stint with a 11 hour time zone difference. Wouldn't want to do that again.

The day-ahead thing is fine. I work half-day on Saturday and Monday is nice and quiet.

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