Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wages due to inflation have spiked, you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees. Sure it’s unrealistic for a company to expect every employee is 100% engaged 40 hours a week, especially in knowledge / creative work we’re sometimes unplugging and downtime is exactly what the job requires. But it seems equally unrealistic to crow about how the pandemic has demonstrated that WFH is perfectly fine and had no negative impacts because everyone was already only putting in 20 hours a week and not expect that to have caused companies to make a shift.

I think we've built companies and cultures that are incompatible with long-term employment and happiness.

Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a while to establish themselves (and a reputation).

The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer hours, though those hours are more productive because they know the ropes.

There is a sweet spot where someone knows enough to be productive but isn't yet complacent. This is the spot that every employer dreams of: employees cranking, full speed, productively, for 8 hours.

It's just not sustainable. You can fire people and try and keep turning over staff such that everyone stays in that sweet spot, but you'll eventually end up with a different sort of headache when your staff has no organizational memory for why decisions were made. The people who built things and have the long-term visions have left, and those who pick up the torch try will never have the same big-picture in their head.

The challenging bit is how do you separate someone who works 3h a day because that's all they can sustain (and they're just being realistic), and those who work 3h a day, could work more, but chooses not to? I'm not sure you want to force either out, but can you incentivize the latter to produce more?

Here's the real challenge: stop thinking in hours, limit upper bounds so employees don't inevitably fall into a race to the bottom (like what is happening now).

If your 3-hour-could-be-8 made adequate contribution, whatever that is, that's enough. If it takes them 8 to get to where the other is, incentives will push them to do so.

> If your 3-hour-could-be-8 made adequate contribution, whatever that is, that's enough. If it takes them 8 to get to where the other is, incentives will push them to do so.

This works great until you PIP an underperforming female, minority, or person over 40.

The discrimination lawsuits will make the company regret their progressive stances.

You wouldn’t believe how many times I have seen this happen.

The median outcome is a settlement with no admission of guilt (usually because it’s cheaper than the alternatives), and the person now has a job for life or is given severance until they get a comparable position elsewhere (and they won’t be rushing).

I think there's plenty of people that would crank out code* given a sane supporting organization. The issue is that most organizations aren't sane and there's little incentive to crank out code. Incentives are generally (1) finish 5 points of stories per week and (2) build a resume/promotion package. Both of those sound okay but tend to be wrought with perverse incentives.

(1) leads you down the path of padding estimates so you don't miss. It also means if you finish early you don't really want to pull in more stories. That tells people you're padding estimates and they'll push you to lower estimates or take on more stories. Then when you need that padding it's not there. So if you finish your work on Wednesday it's better to chill and look busy instead of doing more.

(2) is just obviously bad. Delivering complicated projects and supervising other employees makes you look better. So projects get complicated and teams get bloated.

*Crank out code should probably be "build functionality according to good practices" but doesn't really change the point.

I think software is just an immature profession — so we don’t have a good idea of what a day looks like.

Looking at my day as a carpenter, then:

- 30 minutes break

- 30 minutes startup/cleanup

- 1 hour moving stuff/between jobs

- 6 hours ostensibly working; 4-5 hours focused

And what I expect of SDEs, now:

- 1 hour breaks

- 1-2 hours communicate (email, CRs, meetings, etc)

- 1 hour continuing education/corporate overhead

- 4-5 hours writing code/tasks

I’m always skeptical when I hear people are doing more than around 4 hours of coding a day — and start to wonder what’s being skipped.

The difference between working from home and working in the office is not how many hours of productive work you do, it's in what you do with the rest of the day.

Every single study done on it shows that creative staff (including engineers) are more productive working where they are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least productive environment, etc. So it's utterly unsurprising that people get more productive working from home and can do 8 hour's office work in 5 hours at home.

But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave Slack on and go do something useful. It's not only that WFH gives people more time, it's that it removes the "you must pretend to be busy for 25% of your workday" restriction.

As always, a negative reaction to WFH is a sign of bad management culture. Good managers are happy that their people are getting more done and happier about it. Bad managers see "they're only doing 20 hours a week if they work from home!" and are angry about it.

So is it a question of the work day or where you work from?

I'm not sure I understand your question completely, but if I understand it right, this is more a question of "are you hired to do 40 hours a week at work, or are you hired to perform a set of tasks?".

The objections to WFH tend to come from managers who manage by insisting their employees do at least 40 hours in the office each week, rather than measuring actual output and productivity, because it's easier. A similar question is: If you're super efficient and get your work done quickly, can you end your day early and go home?

Sorry, let me clarify.

In your GP comment, you say "But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave Slack on and go do something useful."

I think I agree with your second paragraph entirely.

To me, two issues are being conflated here: the location of the work (wfh vs office) and the length of the work day. The benefits of wfh you are describing sound like they could more or less also come from a 6 hour work day. Ignoring commute time (it's an issue, but just for simplicity's sake). You'd be able to do useful things around your house just the same if you were in an office for 6 hours and able to go home.

Some would describe what you're saying as "slacking" for those hours outside the six, but I don't see it that way. Instead, wfh has become a socially acceptable vehicle for a shorter work day. It allows workers to achieve a shorter work day while bypassing those arguments. I think productive discussion around the issue is impossible until these issues are disentangled.

> Some would describe what you're saying as "slacking" for those hours outside the six

this is the core issue - are you hired to do 8 hours of work, or are you hired to complete a set of tasks?

if the former, then yes, you're slacking off if you stop after 6 hours

if the latter, then no, as soon as you're done with those tasks then you have completed your day's work and can go do something else.

old-skool authoritarian management tends towards the former, and tends to measure time-at-desk rather than actual productivity. Hence they don't like WFH because it forces the latter.

> Every single study done on it shows that creative staff (including engineers) are more productive working where they are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least productive environment, etc.

Do you have any specific sources on hand (preferably a good meta-study)? I've heard this claim a lot, and I'd like it to be true, but I've never seen it sourced. Also, I feel like it could depend a lot on the individual, but anecdote is not data.

And yes, open-plan offices truly suck.

Sorry, I don't. I did have it when we were discussing productivity during my MBA, and the lecturer gave us a bunch of references for the studies that have been done, but that was a few years ago and they're probably out of date now.

It's one of those well-known truths ("diverse teams are more productive" is another one) that's well-supported by the literature and generally agreed on, but still comes up as "needs citation" every time. I should go dig out the citation so I can avoid this when I bring it up ;)

There’s no way you can sustain 8 hours/day of productive work 5 days a week as a developer. It’s not working a field or packing boxes, there’s a mental component that gets exhausted over time.

Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments.

Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this into their 50’s.

6 minutes billed is rarely the same thing as 6 minutes worked.

Correct. It’s usually like 30.

You have to open the file, find the email you were going to respond to, double check with whoever that the answer is “yes”, look up the other attorney’s phone number, double check your calendar to make sure the date works, call you spouse to make sure they can pick up the kids that day, and then call the other attorney.

If you think Biglaw clients, with in house counsel that used to be at biglaw, blindly pay padded bills at $800/hr, you are mistaken.

Sure. I could do that too as a software engineer.

How much you bill and how much you work aren't necessarily the same. Why would you think they are?

They’re not the same. In addition to the 40-60 hours a week of billable work, they do 10-20 hours of nonbillable work as well.

And everyone likes biglaw attorneys and thinks that they’re well adjusted people too

Does that job involve constant creativity, or is it more about applying existing knowledge? I have no idea, but the amount of knowledge that law students need to cram in a few years makes me think it's a lot of the latter.

IANAL, but have family & friends in biglaw

> Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments.

A surprising portion of that work is random menial stuff, they don't actually end up doing 40hr/week of mentally demanding work.

> Plus, they do this into their 50’s.

The ones that survive to make partner do. But its well-known that BigLaw absolutely burns through associates. Very few BigLaw associates make it past 35, most eventually leave for saner pastures of corporate counsel/government/etc jobs.

This analogy is interesting do you think there are some lawyers that consider themselves 10xlawyers haha. It make sense that a lot of it would be similar to documentation and meetings and various agile ceremonies and not just 2200 hours of straight legal argumentation and writing.

Biglaw clients aren’t suckers. They don’t pay $800/hr for agile ceremonies. They go over their bills with a fine tooth comb and have ML systems to detect padding.

Any idea why six minutes and not some other?

It varies, but 6 min = 1/10th of an hour so it’s pretty common.

1/10 of an hour.

Not sure if this is changing with all the time tracking software now but it's easier to bill by tenths than it is to track/calculate exact minutes and any larger unit might involve too much rounding up. e.g. .1 for a quick email reply is more palatable than a .25 (1/4 hour, 15min) minimum.

0.1 hours?

American lawyers, as a profession, have one of the highest rates of alcohol abuse and mental illness in the country.

And more than that - it's abstract problem solving. Sometimes the problem is never gonna have an answer until I am washing my dishes after breakfast tomorrow. My subconscious & creativity can't be sped up.

It's this idiocy that you can convert time into software at a fixed rate that got us into this mess.

aka "The Mythical Man Month" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

I recently read through that book and it's nuts both how prescient it is and how different some of the suggestions are than what anyone now would consider.

For instance, there was talk of a team structure with one programmer and everyone else in specialized, supporting roles. That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor.

> That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor.

Rightly so. Job hopping is much easier in the software industry now than it was when that book was written. Average tenure in software jobs is significantly lower than the average for all professions, and even that general average is only around 4 years.

speak for yourself?

Then you’re not really doing software development, just copying code off of google ;)

burnout only happens if you are working on something you hate and actively have to force yourself to work on it or have external stress from bad coworkers, managers, or general life stuff. I've worked 12+ hour days on side projects for fun and felt fresh and mentally sharp because I enjoyed what I was doing.

The idea that the human brain hits some brick wall at the scheduled 40 hour work week and can't do anymore thinking is comical

> you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees.

Sure. Do this if you want to kill morale and be chronically understaffed (either not enough bodies or not enough qualified bodies) for the rest of your existence.

This type of mentality breeds mediocrity for a number of reasons, the main one being that A-players will run away from teams/companies structured around these heuristics. Furthermore, they will make sure all of their A-player friends are aware of this environment.

Good managers and good management teams have no issues with productivity of in-office or remote workers. If your team or company is actually having productivity issues (rather than using productivity as a precursor to a rif), then point that finger at the management and management culture.

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