Are 12-16 Hour Workdays Productive? 615
theodp writes " It's important to me,' former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz recalls saying as he threatened a manager for termination because one of his subordinates failed to conduct 1:1 meetings, 'that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It's why I come to work.' Ben seems to be cut from the same management cloth as new Yahoo CEO Marissa 'I-Don't-Really-Believe-In-Burnout' Mayer, who boasted how she solved the work-life balance problems of mother-of-three 'Katie,' who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls with her Google Finance team in Bangalore, by no longer making Katie also stay for late meetings on her Google day shift on those occasions where it'd make her miss her kids' soccer games and recitals." Jason Fried, C.E.O. of 37signals, wrote a piece for The New York Times recently singing the praises of working a 4-day week part of the year.
If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
.. the answer is no.
And now that seems very valid.
It depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they were productive... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My boss seems to think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
32 hour week! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's crazy, working 12 or 16 hours a day, and that five days or maybe six a week? If you have no social life, earn $10k+ a month, if your work is your hobby, if it's your own business - maybe. I cannot imagine doing this, but I know people who live like that. I prefer a 32 hour workweek, all year, and here (in the Netherlands) this is very common. We do also have 25 holidays a year (for a fulltime 40 hour workweek).
If know that my performance will go down when working 10+ hours a day. I even think that 7.5 hours work would be more productive.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this some sort of joke? I do a lot of conference calls with Japan and the latest we go is 8PM EST (but I live in CST so it is only 7PM for me.
Bangalore is a little tougher, but they could still do 10PM central US, 8:30AM Bangalore. Is google so inflexible that they refuse to reschedule a meeting to be more convenient for everyone involved?
Also- this is a good reminder for me to never do business with India if I want to remain sane. The meeting times in Japan and Korea overlap not terribly bad with awake hours in the US, but once you go that extra hour or two to India it seems to become very inconvenient.
Re:Capitalism is in terminal decay (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how the definition of socialism has turned into "whatever the corporate bozos at the top don't like."
8 hours/day came about for a reason (Score:5, Insightful)
+2 hours travel - If I take the the bus it takes me about an hour to get to work and an hour home.
+8 hours working (minimum usually 10 for me)
+1 hour lunch and breaks
---------------------
11 hours just to work
+8 hours sleep
---------------------
19 hours dedicated work and sleep
That leaves at best 5 hours for doing things like dishes, meals, wife, kids, laundry, continuing education, and most important showers.
So if you want stinky hungry employees who don't see their families then by all means push them. But you'll find the good one's will find other jobs in about 2-3 months. That what happened at my last full time job. 40% of teh staff left in 4 for weeks of each other and another 20% 2 months after that.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
.. the answer is no.
And now that seems very valid.
I've read somewhere that out of a regular 8-hour working day, people are at the peak of their productivity for about 4.5 hours. Somehow it doesn't make sense to me that to prolong a working day when you're already tired could be better in term of actual work getting done than giving it a few extra hours in the weekend. But it may be a good way of getting paid for hours spent by staring vacuously at the screen, that much I'll admit.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you are doing... grinding out code for 16 hours straight, that might be productive once or twice a week, try doing it for 28 days straight and I don't think anybody is getting anything useful out of that.
Some "jobs" involve calling people up, schmoozing, doing lunch or dinner, etc. Those could be done 16 hours a day indefinitely, if you don't have a life outside work - and, if you don't have a life outside work, then why should the company pay you anything beyond your work related expenses? That's starting to sound like 18th century manual farm labor in the U.S. South...
If anybody has ever done endurance cycling (think: Tour de France, for normal human beings), there's a physical capacity of your body that runs longer than the 24 hour period. You might do a 100 mile ride in a day, but you won't likely do 5 100 mile rides in 5 consecutive days. I think that most technical/design brain work follows a similar capacity, better to do 5 consecutive 30 mile days than try for 2 100s in a row and crash.
Yes and no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you have a family, it's abusive behavior. Not spending time with family/kids is how the American family and education got fucked up.
Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am LEAST EFFECTIVE after the 8 hour mark every day. Same with all the co-workers, every hour after a standard 8 hour day degrades exponentially in productivity. In reality things start degrading at hour 6, but honestly we are still above the "typical productivity" water mark for the next 2 hours.
any manager demanding extreme work days is a highly uneducated and ineffective manager. Upper management needs to look at replacing any manager that is so bad at his/her job that the average daily work time is greater than 8.5 hours.
Re:It depends... (Score:2, Insightful)
I find that occasional long days of 14-16 hours can be just fine.
What the fuck? Do you hate living? Don't you have anything better to do????
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what most people miss about productivity is that there is a lot of variety in the world, some people are more productive when you leave them the hell alone, others need social interaction 2, 5, 37 times a day depending on the individual.
The 4.5 peak hour number sounds correct as an average to me, but it depends on what you are doing... picking up trash from the side of the road, call center desk jockey, cashier, etc., probably doesn't have much of a peak and is more of a physical endurance thing. The "new economy" is moving more toward jobs that require "advanced" mental activity, and for some people 4.5 hours a day might be a stretch - others might grind for 6 and actually accomplish more than they do in 4.5.
Type A MBA types (Score:5, Insightful)
The next group (and often overlapping with the first group) just have OCD and don't know any other way. They would work 24 hours a day if they could. As with all things OCD they can't explain why they are driven to do what they do but they think something bad will happen if they don't. An easy way to tell this type is by the size of their spreadsheets. I have met OCD types with time management spreadsheets that went into the double letter columns.
Another group are screw-ups or frauds and don't leave because they need to control the whole situation and make sure that people don't step into their position for a moment and detect the fraud. This type often either avoids vacation or breaks it up into short little one so that nobody takes over.
The least frequent is someone who is determined to succeed at something where the benefits to success are huge, curing cancer or something and they are actually contributing to the end goal with every hour they put in.
The saddest is the over stressed employee who works for a crappy company where they have to give "110%" just to keep their jobs. Sort of the Glengarry Glen Ross thing of "First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is you're fired." These places tend to be family run where the family feels that every low paid employee should work as hard as they did once when they first started the business.
In almost all of the above situations the person is a bully and even if they are productive their insanity drives the the best employees away resulting in a slow but sure gutting of the company. The horrible problem is that for a short while it usually generates results. So you bring in the new type A manager and boom the team doubles productivity. Manager gets huge bonus. But a 6 months later 3 of the very best people have left. A year later those 3 have recruited 6 more of the very best. The remaining dregs develop ulcers and huge mistakes start to happen. The golden child manager successfully blames those who have left for the new problems. Then the golden child moves on to something new and more lucrative highlighting their success where they doubled productivity when they took over.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
I find a bit of distraction on Slashdot helps me work some times. Other times I am "in the zone" and won't look at anything else, but some tasks you just need a break from and a bit of time away from it to let your mind do some background processing.
I am an embedded software engineer, if it matters.
Re:Yes, on occasion (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with the latter two, but the first one screams "bad management" to me.
A regular "end of month sprint" is quite simply trying to catch up with stuff, that didn't get done. Things that don't get done is down to bad management.
Yes, there can be rare occasions where an entire department is crashed for a bit (illness, accidents etc), but that's not something that should happen on a regular basis.
What an asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
Lordy. I know I shouldn't have RTFA, but this guy Horowitz comes across as the biggest asshole not featured on a .cx TLD.
When Steve came into my office I asked him a question: “Steve, do you know why I came to work today?”
Steve: “What do you mean, Ben?”
Me: “Why did I bother waking up? Why did I bother coming in? If it was about the money, couldn’t I sell the company tomorrow and have more money than I ever wanted? I don’t want to be famous, in fact just the opposite. ”
Steve: “I guess.”
Me: “Well, then why did I come to work.”
Steve: “I don’t know.”
Me: “Well, let me explain. I came to work, because it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It’s why I come to work.”
Steve: “OK.”
Me: “Do you know the difference between a good place to work and a bad place to work?”
Steve: “Umm, I think so.”
[continues to drone on in this patronising and insulting vein...]
He sounds like a reject from a 50s infomercial.
What an insufferable prick.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
That seems completely backwards. Instead of 11PM US EST / 8:30AM Bangalore (or wherever,) why not wait 12 hours and make it 11AM/8:30PM? Or better yet 9AM/6:30PM. That doesn't seem bad at all.
There's truth in the saying... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody ever died wishing he'd spent more time at the office.
Once you get a homelife and kids (assuming you can squeeze dating into your 16-hour workdays) you'll hopefully realize how precious that is before it's too late.
Dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
As a European I find her use of "positive" rhetorics/manipulation to be worrying... like she is offering you something, namely a chance to do "what really matters to you" while at the same time she robs you blind of the biggest part of your free time and this fact isn't even part of the discussion. So you lose 4 to 6 hours free time each working day and get 1 or 2 hours back "to be with the kids". Sure, what a great trade-off for the employer. Sure she could do it in 1999 when she was in her early 20s, now she is 36 and I doubt she does 16 hours each day and if so then how long does she think she can keep it up? If work is all you have in life, sure you can invest the maximum of your available time in it but you know, for most people it is NOT all they have in life. I think this is recklessly endangering her own health and as someone in important positions like this, she actually OWES it to her company to take care of her health especially well.
And what a well-researched "opinion" to simply claim "burn out" does not exist.
Only in management's dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't live to work (Score:3, Insightful)
I work to live, and while I really do enjoy my work, I don't enjoy it so much that I'm willing to sell the majority of my life to a faceless corporation that won't remember me five minutes after I've retired. I work as much as I need to in order to pay the mortgage, and the rest of the time, I travel, study, read, and compose. The hours that exist outside of work hours are simply not for sale at any price.
Re:What an asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
While reading it, I couldn't help thinking about Office Space. Sad really.
there are two kinds of riches... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two kinds of riches.
One is the big house, the fancy new car, all the toys.
The other is time with your family, friends, time for yourself.
I've worked the crazy hours, made a ton of money, and I'd go home and I did not know the people there -- my wife and daughter.
Decide what you want. Make trade-offs for work/life balance.
You can get another job pretty easily. You cannot get new family or friends so easily.
Are 12 to 16 hour work days productive? Yes, if you only care about the money.
Wake up CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps this guy should take a look at how his employees view his company: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Opsware-Reviews-E11055.htm
Doesn't look like those 1:1 meetings are really paying off in "that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life."
Re:My boss seems to think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention we have spent the last 100 years tirelessly working on labour saving devices which reduce the number of hours required to create the necessities of life. We could probably move to a 4 hour day without any serious problems. This is stupid, backwards and uncivilised and the argument about whether one can be productive for 16 hours at a stretch is entirely beside the point.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes and no. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck you and your marriage and your kids. I won't do 12-16 hour days as a single guy because I also want a life beyond work. Find someone else to throw under the bus, asshole.
Sure, if you have skin in the game (Score:4, Insightful)
Would I work 16 hour days for a $100,000 annual salary? Yeah, no. But, equity stakes, large bonuses, overtime - you have my attention.
I don't work because it is fun, I work to acquire money.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely, a 16hr coding day can be productive, but you better be damn sure the coder has the day off afterwards, and possibly even beforehand.
I've done a few stints like this near crunch time where I've maybe done a 12hr day followed by 2 16hr days, but then I've fully made sure I get the following 2 working days off to give a 4 day weekend or whatever.
Effectively you can frontload (or backload) work like this with 16hr days, but what you can't do is make it a permanent thing and expect a permanent productivity boost - on the contrary, you'll see completely the opposite.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt I'd find the extra time productive if it were mandatory because longer hours necessitate the freedom to leave and rest when you're no longer productive. But when I wrote my thesis for example, two weeks of 10-12 hour days got the job done. If I'd worked longer days I wouldn't have been able to resume easily the next morning because of fatigue. Shorter 8 hour days would have eliminated my most productive writing time.
Sleep (Score:5, Insightful)
8 hours sleep.
8 hours work.
8 hours leisure (which INCLUDES travel to/from work and everything else).
I think you should be grateful that you get ONE HALF of my entire waking life every weekday. And I *earn* the weekends by not doing a crappy job.
Weekends are also my buffer if you don't pay me enough, I have an emergency of some kind that needs me to work for money, or whatever else. Out of respect for the working agreements, I won't do that as a night-shift or after work during the week without your permission, but if I suddenly need to earn money at the weekends too - that's *my* business. Even if it's just flogging some old tat on eBay or a boot sale.
And there is "work" outside of paid work too - I either have to pay some professional to do some DIY or do it myself. Either way, that's more of my earned money and free time I burn up *NOT* lazing around the house.
Anything above and beyond that is for something:
- that was caused by something stupid that I did (including lack of planning!). I *will* rectify my mistakes if they've caused some provable, detrimental effect on the business. That's professional pride.
- is absolutely vital, cannot be put off, and cannot be done by others during the working day, is voluntary and that I will expect back in kind (notice: not money necessarily, but when I want a day off later in the year, or better tools, or training, or whatever, you better not get snarky about it).
Anything outside those criteria? You're trying to steal my life for your company and the only recompense I can possibly EVER reap is money (if anything!) which can't cover the sort of ills that work like that can cause.
If you regularly work more hours than that, you either have no concept of life outside work, value money too much, or you are, quite honestly, weak-willed or mentally ill (e.g. depression, anxiety, etc. causing you to not want to say No).
The bigger question is: What does the company get out of employing tired drones? Savings on wages for any "free" work they can make you do? That's about it. They should be hiring someone else instead, if they cared about their customers, products or services. Better an extra part-timer for a year than wearing your best workers into the ground chasing some mythical business utopia. And if they can't afford that? Then they were doing business on a knife-edge all along and are probably better off without staff anyway.
You can ask me nicely and "bribe" me for some short-term changes to my contract. Anything longer and you're not upholding your responsibility to your customers or your staff by doing a shoddy job where you should have hired more people.
When you have half my waking life during work-days and you want more? Then I look elsewhere for someone running their business properly rather than a cash cow obtained by grinding up lesser employees.
And, really, if you can't do something in 8 hours, 5 days a week, then you have problems bigger than what you can squeeze out of your employees. Some of the most productive countries in the world work less, on average. And anyone who's worked for themselves knows - you actually earn a LOT more when you just do the job and nothing more, get paid for the day, and go home.
Hell, when I was doing THIS EXACT JOB, but on a self-employed basis, I was earning the same money in less than half the working time. The difference is stability - chasing potential customers, economic fluctuations, insurance, etc. is all a gamble. At any time, you could be doing NO work at all, and not be able to find any. The way out of that is to scale up so that losses are absorbed by profits elsewhere, etc. which is a net gain - you actually make more money out of 10 people working 8 hours than you do 1 person working 80 if you do it right. The *stability* of a good job that you like is just-about worth half-your-money.
The cost of even the best job is unlikely to be worth half-your-waking-life, though.
Bloody hell, people. You hav
What Longer WOrk Days Get You. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Sloppy work.
2. Work filled with errors (not just sloppy, but defective).
3. Resentment.
4. It puts the company as risk of sabotage and theft.
5. A bad reputation....does anyone really want to work at Dell?
I think that in all likelihood the vast majority of achievements in the world came from people who were NOT compelled to work 12 hour days. They may have been working long hours, but they did that because of their passion or competitive drive...they wanted to.
But unless you are on some legitimate high states deadline, long days for the sake of longs days is a bad idea all the way around.
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have met very, very few people who can code with absolute concentration for 16 hours straight (maybe with an hour lunch break in between somewhere). I pulled that stunt a few times in my career, too, and even though I can to some degree do it, afterwards I'm absolutely exhausted and worn out. I usually drop dead into bed and you better not wake me before at the very least 8-10 hours are gone or you will have a very grumpy and very unproductive coworker at your hands.
OTOH, today it would be no biggie to do 16 hours of "work". 99% of my time is spent in meetings that I have to be "awake" for at best 20% of the time. The rest I can mentally shut down and relax as long as my body is present. Why that's paid better than the time when I did some real work is beyond me, but if my boss thinks that's the way it should go...
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you live to work, the answer is yeas and I feel sorry for you. If all that's important is your work, you have no life.
If you work to live, the answer is no. The less work, the better.
Re:just stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen. Nothing kills productivity like frequent meetings. Nothing worse than a manager who wants to find out how the team is doing by getting everyone together for an hour. "How's it going, Mr. Manager sir. It isn't because you keep dragging us into fucking meetings."
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
This rises the question of just what these concalls are trying to acccomplish? Tired people talking with a host of foreigners with accents over what's unlikely to be hifi-level audio equipment doesn't seem exactly productive to me. What's wrong with sending e-mails back and worth - or even installing an NNTP server and using a newsgroup to conduct the conference? You get automatic logging, can read new messages when you're actually awake, multiple topics can be discussed simultaneously in different threads and discussion easily resumed if new insights occur, and the nature of the system will keep it all neatly organized.
Re:What Longer WOrk Days Get You. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
because such things can drag out conversations that could be had in an hour into drawn out e-mail threads that span over days or weeks, wasting precious time?
Re:Capitalism is in terminal decay (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, for Cuba, it's worked out pretty well in a lot of ways: Their GDP is about 10 times what it was in 1970, including recovering from a slump in the early 1990s when they lost all aid from the Soviets. The Communist regime also improved literacy dramatically (from about 60% to 99% today), and has a health care system that's been used as a model for other Latin American countries. Your average Cuban isn't rich and doesn't have political freedom, but they are very likely to have housing, food, clothing, decent health, employment, education for their children, and are living to a ripe old age. They've even been regaining religious freedom since the Soviet collapse, and also are allowed a bit more economic freedom since Raul Castro took over from Fidel.
In short, for day-to-day living, you'd much rather be an average Cuban than an average Haitian.
Re:In Norway, Denmark and Sweden (Score:2, Insightful)
How rich are their executives?
Find that answer, and you'll discover why business leaders in the US are not pushing for a Scandinavian lifestyle.
Re:In Norway, Denmark and Sweden (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right. It has absolutely nothing to do with predominantly culturally unified societies (vs. say, the US or the UK) with large amounts of natural resources that the populations are willing to exploit for financial gain.
Combined with 10-15% unemployment?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, let's think for two seconds. We have productivity levels that have skyrocketed (some of which is caused by overtime, but most of it due to automation and increased efficiency), 10%+ unemployment, college students that can't find work, and you are asking if 16 hour work days are productive?
Yes, those work days are a great brainwashing technique, just ask the U.S. army, or any medical residency training program, or your local fraternity. It's pretty well known that those kinds of hours (combined with sleep deprivation) are great for keeping people so broke down that they can't think for themselves. However, in the face of 10%+ unemployment, what are you, crazy? How about we employ the entire work force before we worry about making some of us work 16 hours a day.
Re:just stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly; there's a balance here. I've been in companies that did both extremes: pretty much zero meetings, and many meetings per week (for us rank-and-file engineers). Both are bad. Too many meetings are distracting and waste a lot of time (more than just the meetings, because there's overhead time where you "get in the zone" before you're really productive, and breaking up the day at arbitrary times ruins that, and zero meetings mean no one has any idea what anyone else is doing.
What's really bad is when your team is behind schedule on a project, so management schedules even more meetings so you can discuss why you're behind schedule.