Ask HN: Force devs to take time off? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Force devs to take time off?

5 pointsaunty_helen16 comments

Hey community, I've started a little ai dev company and I'm having a bit of a dilemma.

I can't get my devs to take time off, one in particular was recently working on the same day as his sisters wedding, which was also Sunday.

I've tried to warn them about burnout and being more productive by taking rest but I still see them logged in on Slack when they're meant to be having time off.

I want to know how it's dealt with at your work?

The only thing I've been able to think of is some kind of tool to lock all of their accounts but they would probably still end up working in their IDE.

View on HN

The only way is for leadership to model the desired behavior. Do not email people on weekends or odd hours. Do not appear online. Do not check in any code. Talk about your nice relaxing weekend spent gardening. When you see people working say, "I'm not working weekends, so why should you?" Make sure the other leaders are doing the same.

This is going to get most people on board, but a few will still have deeply ingrained bad habits. When you see it, just tell them, "there's no reward at this company for burning out. If you want to work that hard, it's your business, but please do not bother your teammates or set the expectation they should be trying to keep up with your hours."

I firmly believe this is the most healthy and productive for most people. A few people live to work so you might as well let them while trying to insulate your normal folks.

I'll start with a confession. Based on below, I'm #3, all the way, and I think #2 is the absolute worst. I see it from an accounting point of view: you've got a liability on the books the moment the benefit is promised and it's in everyone's best interest to have it realized on a steady schedule.

1. Individual allocations with strict "rollover" policies.

2. Unlimited, but reasonable, timeoff policies.

3. Individual allocations with 0% carry-over: if you would lose it, it's forced upon you. Please don't make us drag it out.

So that said, I don't see how you have a prayer in the world of avoiding "drag it out" unless you have a management culture thats firmly based in what dougmwne suggests: lead by example and you won't have to fight the extremes (which are unlikely to give anyway) for the sake of the core quite so much.

It's also more compatible with highly-geographical laws around unused vacation payouts. If you think your organization is winning, by minimizing these kind of benefits... I think you're definitely losing and it's putting your most dedicated talent at long-term risk for short term gain.

This is how it works where we are. In our onboarding, HR showed us a tutorial of how to apply for leave, using her own account. "Oh see I took a month off this year, and it's okay if you need to take time off for yourself." My manager was also on leave then - he left a welcome message saying to contact X for GitHub access, even though it would be fast for him to do it now.

That's quite impactful when you're given the message that early, that the people in charge of rejecting your time off encourage you to do it.

There's also something on the wiki warning us about burnout. There's plenty of talks on avoiding burnout. Nobody attends them, but we get the message that it's costly to the company when it happens and not something to be proud of.

If it's truly just a handful of people (five or less), this feels like it'd merit a face to face conversation. We're internet strangers making armchair assumptions about other strangers, and it very well could be they have reasons for working beyond normal times.

(Doesn't mean they're good reasons. But starting with a honest conversation, showing them evidence of working beyond the pale, and explaining why you're concerned about that should go a long way to untangling something deeper. Maybe they have a horrible home life they're wanting to distract themselves from, to which there are other solutions for.)

With zero knowledge of your company and culture, I can only offer very broad strokes advice on this;

- Burnout is real and it will happen to people that work like that. Explain clearly that burning out means their hard work, and other peoples hard work goes to waste.

- Consider ways in which you might be inadvertently encouraging this behaviour. Are your devs constantly stressing about output or profitability? Do you often email or slack people at weird hours? Are people expected to be on-call? etc etc.

- Offer an extra day or two off every now and then and make sure everyone takes it. My company has at least a couple of 2 or 3 day breaks throughout the year in addition to our leave entitlements, and they are absolutely mandatory for everyone to take. This does wonders for morale, and I'm shocked this isn't more of a widespread thing.

- Monitor and moderate their assigned work if you have to. If engineer X has 20 unfinished tasks this sprint and they're all due tomorrow, that's a problem for everyone. Make sure they know to speak up early if they're over burdened.

- If you can, offer some sort of employee assistance program. People use work to escape from home and personal lives they don't like, having someone to talk to anonymously may help a bit.

Thanks for the advice, yes I am a culprit for a fair bit of this behaviour. Today's been my most "day off" day for 16 days now.

I'm also finding that the only time I have to write code is when everyone else is sleeping... so taking corrective actions there.

For scheduling, we use a trello board and it's a pick up as you go situation. I'm not sure how I could restrict that and I really like the simplicity of it so don't want to throw it away for another solution.

The 2/3 days off for everyone is an interesting concept. I'm doing a bunch of policy changes at the moment (hence the question), it's something I'll keep on the cards.

No problem! I've been in a sort of similar situation myself and I know it can be hard; this is one of many "do as I say not as I do" situations that you'll probably find yourself in.

If people are aware that you're often up at odd hours hammering away at stuff, maybe just communicate that you don't have this expectation of them, and that you would strongly prefer they didn't follow suit (or whatever messaging would be appropriate for your situation). I'm sure folks would understand and hopefully get the message and if not at least it's a starting point.

Either way, good luck and thank you for thinking of your employee's wellbeing!

I don’t think forcing people to do stuff is right because it doesn’t address the issue. Plus, what if you “force” them and they end up doing work in secret anyways? If you find out, are you going to fire them?

I do think pressuring devs to take time off; making it harder (or at least not easier) for them to work when they “don’t need to”; explicitly telling them that working extra hours doesn’t actually create more productivity (then showing them the studies) and that it genuinely doesn’t make them look any better in your eyes - all of those are good ideas.

Of course, make sure they’re not bogged down with work or getting benefits like extra money from working extra.

Ultimately, you dont know your devs motivation for why they’re working extra. Maybe the dev working on Sunday is a hair-pulling workaholic, maybe he just got really bored at the wedding and figured doing work then would give him better free time later.

If they want to work, let them. When they deliver something significant, give them a few extra days off. IMO, nothing is more destructive to a development organization than being rigid about hours worked. In my 20s, I would work 60-80 hrs per weeks for months at a time. When I delivered, I would blow off whole days at the golf course, playing early rudimentary video games (it was the 80s), sometimes for 3-4 weeks. Drove my boss crazy. But his boss understood and kept folks off my case. When I moved into mgmt, I maintained the philosophy. It’s what the developer delivers, not the hours they work or when.

Burnout is bad, but keep in mind that software development is a special beast. Some developers have streaks of productivity and procrastination. They may do overtimes not only to compensate in their mind for the time they’ve slacked. They themselves get f---ing tired of loops of wasting time doing nothing useful, and when they can they try to “just get this shit finally done”, because it hurts otherwise. It’s likely their own interest, not an urge to please you. Of course that isn’t healthy anyway, but that’s another story.

You need to relax your company culture. They're not working extra hours to just work more, they're working extra hours because they feel they feel like they have to in order to keep up. The most likely scenario is that you've set aggressive goals and timelines for projects and they feel compelled to work over 40 hours to hit those goals.

People also don't want to be the person on the team not pulling their weight. You and your other leaders are likely working long hours to keep the company growing, which sets the company culture.

Are these devs productive.

If I put in 80 hours a week it might be because I feel I'm constantly behind.

I like 80% / 20% , where 80% is your job + 20% for side projects. If I ran a company I'd even let people just take that 20% off assuming they get their tasks done.

I would lock the servers etc, but won’t work if using e.g. github.

Maybe dock their pay for every event from 1900 to 0700, haha.

Are they paid by the hour? Is it possible that there are multiple developers working as a single employee?

No and no. I have heard of that but I think the instances of it occuring are sensationalised a bit much with this wfh / remote work paradigm shift.

Give them less work

Reply on news.ycombinator.com