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Comment by Magmalgebra | Hacker News Reader

> But in my experience, your manager is expecting you to do all of your assigned role (e.g. write code), but then also do a bunch of stuff on top -- e.g. leading and taking ownership of new initiatives that is extra work.

Aside from AWS, who's famously bad at this, my experience is that this is usually because people want a faster career push.

Imagine Jim, 8 years into his career. Jim is pretty good and his work takes him 30-40 hours a week. If he worked another 5 years in the same role it'd probably drop to 20 and be chill.

Jim wants to get promoted. If he waited the 5 years he could do it working 40 hours a week. But he wants it now, and since he's not as good as he will be he needs to work 60. What does Jim do? He works the 60.

There's nothing wrong with this choice, I made it, I'm happy with my choice. I might make it again in the future, or not.

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> There's nothing wrong with this choice [to work extra hours to get promoted].

But if there are limited slots for promotion, and that's generally always the case, the resulting competition among deserving engineers makes the extra hours more or less mandatory. Say that Amy is a better engineer than Jim and gets a third more done per hour. If Jim puts in 60 hours instead of the expected 40, then Amy isn't going to beat him for a slot unless she also starts working extra hours.

In the end, promotion becomes more about grinding than being effective. That's not great for company culture or retention of top talent.

That doesn't make the promotion more about grinding because the company doesn't care about how much work you get done in a set unit of time compared to other employees in the same set unit of time. The company cares about how much you get done, period.

If the only differentiating factor between Amy and Jim is quantity of work done (this is never the case in real life), most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.

> most companies will prefer a Jim that works 60 hours to an Amy that works 40 if Jim is producing 5% more.

What happens in reality is that Amy produces 10% more in 40 hours than Jim in 60 hours, but she's not a team player because she leaves at 5.

In software development, sure (maybe). Most jobs aren't software development.

The vast majority of jobs your production slows as hours increase but there isn't a tipping point where you're less productive, even after accounting for errors or rework. There's a reason CPAs don't clock out at 37.5 hours during tax season, or warehouses or service desks or any number of things other than the specific thing most of us do often work more than 40 hours a week, especially when actively working to get a promotion.

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