My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a "hustle culture" and very poor internal communication/documentation habits in my opinion.
My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job.
Don't be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don't like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.
Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER.
People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them.
No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the even point of a stupid, unfair one.
Also - you need to just plain not take jobs in companies with hustle cultures if you can avoid it. If everyone on the team is 22, it's probably going to be hell, because they are still to learn the lesson the hard way.
Call it reverse agism or whatever, but it's a joy to work with professionals who have seen dysfunctional workplaces and who have lives.
So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?
You are also reinforcing the stupid unfair system. The game is created by playing it.
> I will only work maximum 30 hours a week. The reason is that I am not productive after 6 hours. It simply does not make sense for you to pay me after 2PM, because I will not do anything productive from 2 to 4PM and you are wasting money.
Everyone smiled. Except the director.
I still got the position, but the director is still hoping I will at some time upgrade to 100%. I said I will consider again after 2 years, but I doubt my perception will have changed by that time.
Reasonable people understand that hours != output.
That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email.
Granted, a lot of my day is spent on our internal chat tool (Slack equivalent), so I suppose that’s mostly equivalent to meetings/email. But I would consider that time mostly productive, and certainly don’t feel like it consumes 5 hours of my 8-hour day.
But I do agree with the last two paragraphs (and the general sentiment that a culture of overtime is never good), and to your point, if what you describe feels productive to you, that’s what’s important.
I hated every minute outside of the three hours of actual work I did every day, but I did it because I felt I had to maintain the appearance of being productive.
The simple reality is that after those three hours of intensive work I didn't have any mental juice left to do useful stuff. At that point in my career I would have given more if I had it, but I just didn't have the mental stamina for that level of focused work.
What I wondered during those years is: if I'm "slacking" most of the day, how can I be a top contributor? But I was, and not because I was particularly smart or good at selling myself. I suspect the answer is simply that most people don't actually work all that many hours a day either, either intentionally or because in order to go through the whole 8-hour workday they pace themselves accordingly.
1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time.
2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into.
3. You're likely to become the "rockstar". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj....
4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team.
5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or "hop on for a quick check". Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer.
If you're finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.
https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-betwee...
"The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work": https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-sl...
It's tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.
Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective. With such an aim it is easy to keep track of your progress over time and maximize your work.
But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually. With such endeavors the goal is not well defined or measurable. Pressure to be productive or have demonstrable results often leads to myopic thinking, local minima, unsustainable designs, technical debt and spaghetti code.
I haven't quite been able to capture why there exist these two modes. The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.
In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious.
The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.
Like you said the impact of a top contributor doing 50% more work can be really large, entire new systems can be built, key features launched. It can get you promoted, but you definitely won’t get a 50% raise.
It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better.
At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours.
Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.
I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture?
I could well believe they actually are less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.
Apathetic lazy me scoots on past workaholic me fairly easily on because it’s afraid of making itself busy later by accident.
https://www.afr.com/companies/fewer-rising-to-technologys-gr...
So people end up producing the appearance of productivity instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.
0. Fire the workaholics by DHH / Signal v. Noise (2008) and Ch. 2 of Rework (2010)
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics
1. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. - pg
I mean, is it really surprising these two are correlated? I'm pretty sure the causation works as follows: they're working extra hours because, like, they felt behind.
Some people who aren't behind may work extra hours anyway...for fun? But I'm guessing that's less people. Not to mention there's cognitive bias at play: these people might not even self-report that as "working extra hours".
I think this comment would be highly upvoted if it included citations to contradictory studies, and maybe had a more constructive tone.
Even if you forget the workers. It's not good for the company.
If you want to be selfish, no judgement, sometimes you gotta do that, but don't be confused about the fact that externally it does harm.
If you have international teams, they shouldn't be working on the same project, if it can be avoided. Having teams with different working hours work the same project sabotages communications.
I mean, sure, we shouldn't harass anyone.
But if they're working 12 hour days, and pinging me on Slack at 7pm, they're the ones harassing me. If they're producing 5 times the lines of code that I am because they're workaholics, thus causing me to spend half my day playing catch-up to their unreasonable schedule, that's also not great.
that on-call hotfix is a completely different problem that has nothing to do with people working overtime.
I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done consciously.
Personally, I work with multiple companies and kinda found my holy grail in that: When I find myself doing questionable work in one place, I can always switch gears to something else and get back to it with some distance and fresh ideas. As an employee expected to work 40+ hours per week for a single company, that was a lot more difficult.
As a fellow ML researcher, I actually have a good answer to this. It's a creative task, not a labor task. Creative tasks require your brain to be exceptionally flexible and to view things from unique perspectives. Research is literally creating something that no one has thought of before so you clearly have to do things no one did before. Plus, the truth is that if you're a researcher, do you ever really "stop"? Because I'll even be sitting down playing videogames and sometimes thats when ideas come to be. Other times when I'm out for a walk. Sometimes it's also when I'm deep in the codebase tearing stuff apart because it's already 5 levels of spagetti figuring out exactly what each line does and thinking a lot about it and its connection to the rest of the program (seriously, we could do a lot more testing if we'd rewrite code from the ground up. Not doing this is like thinking your first attempt at anything is good. Idk about you, but my first attempts are absolute shit and I've learned a lot by the next go around). But all those things are connected together. Because science is very much an art. My best ideas always come from after time I've taken off which is usually long overdue (as in I can barely name 2 realistic vacations in the last 5 years), but exactly like you say, it feels like I can't take the time.
> The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.
Just me and the teams I've worked on/with or are these people also typically low productivity and not the most creative? The type of people that treat science as something you can just hammer away at like there's a clear algorithm to solving any problem. I know it's wrong, but that shit gives me mad imposter syndrome.
Like our literally job is about optimization. You think we'd be able to at least optimize a work day, or maybe a month?
There is lots written about this. Whole careers built on advice about it. It seems what works for some people does not work for others. My outline won't help you if you're in the valley but I'll write it out anyway, some people live elsewhere.
1/ Wake up early. Like daybreak early.
2/ Do not look at email, slack etc. No admin stuff at this point.
3/ Leisurely breakfast letting your mind wander. Historically cooked by wife, ymmv there.
4/ Spend the morning walking, thinking, writing things down. Especially write ideas down before lunch.
5/ It's midday. Optionally eat things. Open email.
6/ Entire afternoon is spent doing whatever "work" one found in the email. Put out the fires. Do the code reviews. Write whatever simple stuff seems to be required.
7/ It's evening. Try to forget the fires. Exercise helps.
8/ Spend the evening on research or socialising. Aim is to have interesting context for dreams.
9/ Sleep time.
That is relatively new to me - couple of months or so - and working really well. Note the complete lack of family activities - either that overlaps the afternoon fires or the morning creativity, or both. Opportunity cost is rough. No creative work for you if there's a toddler or an unsupportive partner present.
This morning-creative afternoon-productive split works really well if most of your colleagues are five hours west of you. They wake up in time to light things on fire. If they're five hours east, maybe swap the two blocks of time over. If they're in the same timezone and expect to talk to you all day, no creative work for you. Opportunity cost again.
Hustle is great if you are going to make 8 figures if the startup you work at ipos. Your roi doesn't really change at big companies. might even be negative in the cases where they freeze raises (msft and others).
Is it? My experience was that it was just all about optics there - 12 hours of "work" but 8 of it is coffee breaks, long lunches, nebulous and unnecessary arch design fitting in tech that makes no sense to have there but that people just wanted to play with...
Some questions that might be interesting to ask yourself:
- How much money do you actually need? - Are there things beyond money that stop you wanting to be a junior dev (status, networks and friendships, parts of your identity)? - Could you afford to take a year or more off work? If so, would a job where you have a junior dev salary be strictly better than that, financially? - Are there ways you could "actually build something" that would be satisfying to you, that don't require a career jump? For example, maybe there are roles or companies in your current industry that offer better work/life balance (at the cost of some salary) and would allow you time for hobbies. - You don't have to be a developer to work in tech. FAANG are massive companies with all sorts of employees (lawyers, doctors, investors, finance people). Are there roles at the big tech companies that would fit into your existing skill set, where you wouldn't take such a hit to salary? Would those satisfy you, or are you more concerned with changing your day-to-day work?
If you manage to cross over to quant dev you'll be able halfway to a sane working environment (it'll probably feel very relaxed to you) and at maybe half your current compensation, assuming you get somewhat lowballed while moving. Spend some time there.
You're now a professional software developer. Optionally cross over into a less mental industry to move the work/life balance curve further.
Hopefully you haven't burned everything you've made so far - investment banking is prone to a run of bad luck turning into unemployment, so if you're living paycheck to paycheck you've got an easy way to shed stress by not doing that any more.
Good luck
You're making about 3x+ of a senior software engineer (sure there are exceptions but they are not the norm) so if you can hold on to that for ten years you've done a whole lifetime of software engineering income.
That said, per another comment, as long as the pay is ridiculously good--which odds are it won't actually be by starting over with a tech company--waiting it out and avoiding lifestyle inflation isn't the worst plan. One of my classmates in school retired from investment banking in his 40s and travels and teaches a bit on the side.
I was asked point blank by my tech CEO: “how much do you work” - first time in my career and that’s having come from NYC finance. Don’t believe the hype!
Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work.
Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word.
Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use.
If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers.
Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.
He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.
During the (now semi-aborted) back-to-office push at my employer, several of us pointed out that a 9-5 in the office is impossible for those of us with children and a commute.
- 8:00am - earliest free drop-off time at school.
- 8:12 or 8:20 - next bus or train to the city. I can probably make that from the school, if I fully sprint for at least half that journey. (Taking a car is riskier; traffic around the school or the station, or bad parking, means that driving is wildly more variable.)
- 9:45 - earliest possible time I can roll into the office.
- 5:00 - I slam my laptop shut, having already put on my coat, and sprint to the subway and/or bike share to head to the train station.
- 5:16 - the earliest possible train I can make, assuming that all of Midtown stops for me.
- 6:31 - the earliest possible arrival back home, 31 minutes past aftercare's closing time.
The only way this would be doable is by hiring childcare for both mornings and afternoons, every day of the week, to the tune of ~$50 extra per day, minimum. That's on top of the cost of the commute.
I never understood why people throw the baby out with the bathwater on things like this.
i understand the problem for a single parent. in most countries they just can't work 8 hours a day. the time where kids are away for me for example is barely 8 hours by the clock. that is without commuting time and lunch break. once the kids come home someone needs to start preparing dinner, followed by housework.
with two parents however, one parent could work early, and the other could work late so that there is one parent around in the morning and one in the evening.
the trouble now is of course that this becomes a coordination problem with two different employers who have different expectations for the work schedule
I'm not 100% sure the hours here in Germany (sadly lacking the need to know), but I think many are 08:00-13:30.
That part I said about us being shallow and easily giving into the optics? This is not going to change, as trying to change deeply basic human nature is a fool's errand.
Stepping off a well-paid career trajectory is also hard to do even if you're pretty sure you have enough savings to comfortably cover your annual living expenses. It can be hard to get back on if things don't go as planned. I've definitely known people who ended up pushing semi-retirement out a bit because work wasn't getting in the way of life too much and why not stash some more money away while the stashing is good?
If I had to regularly spend 3 hours a day commuting, I would quit and find a job that doesn't do that shit to me.
Everything was different than the scenario I described in my earlier comment, including my employer. (And to be clear, my current employer dropped the 9-5 requirement when they realized they wouldn't have any engineers left if they tried to enforce it.)
The commute was significantly shorter, and we relied on the subway - not trains - which came more regularly.
There was no requirement for a 9-5, and so I could either do both drop-off and pick-up, or we could divide the responsibilities between my spouse and I.
Furthermore, we could work from home as necessary.
> with two parents however, one parent could work early, and the other could work late so that there is one parent around in the morning and one in the evening. the trouble now is of course that this becomes a coordination problem with two different employers who have different expectations for the work schedule
Exactly. And I would have choice words for an employer who suggested that the problem they're plopping in my lap for no reason should suddenly become my spouse's concern.
It does take specific effort, mainly expressed in written communications in tickets/issues and other more ephemeral channels (Slack in our case). You have to think carefully about what information must be shared and how to do so. You can't just drop a random comment and hope for a good interpretation. There needs to be a "call to action": a question, a request for specific activity/response, or a suggestion (or several) for possible next steps. There also needs to be trust built between team members, which takes time and similar effort.
But when this is unlocked to its fullest potential it becomes an absolute super-power. The problem you were facing when you finished the day? Fixed by your team-mates when you start the next day, some more progress (hopefully), and they hand back the next problem to solve. Apparent velocity goes through the roof and personally I find it incredibly satisfying.
Mind you, this is all coming from an all remote/all async company. I can potentially see problems if you had two part-teams in separate time-zone separated offices with minimal overlap. Then you'd potentially run into the usual human tribalism and culture drift, and communications aren't necessarily going to solve that.
Not really, but you have to become good at written communication. Which has a lot of benefits beyond the immediate one.
In companies where everything happens by people huddling together real-time, the result is (nearly always) that nothing is documented, which leads to disaster longer term.
I've loved working on projects where the team is globally distributed so that there is activity 24hrs and you work with people with zero overlap on working hours.
Instead of relying on ephemeral hallway conversations, you need to build a culture of updating tickets with informative content, documenting plans, and so on. This fill the immediate need of daily communication but more importantly now you have everything documented and a paper trail of every decision and bug fix which is incredibly valuable.
In any case, we already pay for the aftercare regardless of whether we're commuting to work that day or not; that's a cost that's already budgeted for.
With ai is it even worth it to try to get started in software or robotics? I feel like i will not be able to get a job bc these systems are advancing so fast, they will take the jr jobs first.
Value in my industry is really created from relationships (origination). The modeling and analysis work can probably be automated away with ai in a short time. I’m trying to bring the firm in that direction so that i can manage that.
I'm not at all convinced AI is going to radically change the culture of most industries in the relatively near term. There have been enormous changes to the tooling for all kinds of tech over the past few decades and I don't really see big changes to the work culture--other than the pay for software development at "tech" companies often increasing relative to other types of engineering. (It's not clear to me that sort of differential is sustainable.)
(It sounds like you're in a position where you feel like you're compensated well enough that you'd be open to taking half the pay if it meant you could maintain the same return on investment: i.e. put in only half the work.)
By bringing up Copilot, it shows that you're already dabbling with adjacent ideas. Would love to know if/why you haven't considered this already and more about your work, including what parts, if any, make it a non-starter.
The point is that there's plenty of high level, technical, and nuanced communication that can only happen between experts. The expertise isn't documented anywhere (unless you count previous email exchanges), it's not somehow represented in a database, and often times decisions are highly specific to one particular situation. Asking a non expert to fulfill this role is difficult enough. I'm not convinced that this is a problem solved by technology.
There are things that I'm not good at that I'm better off not spending time hacking at to do a mediocre job--e.g. web stuff generally or design--but that's really something else.
Then it's 11, then they get ready for the day, then it's lunch time. Then it's lunch coma. Then by 3PM they start gaining speed. By that time, I am already exhausted.
I practice sleep hygiene and have tried cutting out caffeine. Conversely, there's no amount of caffeine capable of facilitating deep work before 10:30-11AM, just end up frantically clicking around articles and wishing for sleep.
Maybe these people aren't trying to game the optics, they just are naturally at their most productive from 11-7. IMHO it's awesome that your company allows that kind of flexibility (and that the morning startup is at 10:30!)
The thing that saved me were these $35 acupressure mats. 20-30 minutes and I am out.
VP of engineering who is not on top of the commit activity only sees me there 10 to 5, but they see the dude staying late with them.
Waking at 6, 7, 8, 10, seems pretty arbitrary, but waking up at 0-hour feels more significant to me.
I've never really thought about why that is, but just the relative difference between the numbers may be part of it
Personally I like to start working around 8, so I can triage the monitoring while the brain runs through the last boot processes and unit activations so I can use those (for me) very productive hours between 9 and 12.
I’m usually ready to go full speed by 8AM, I wfh and kids are out the door to school by 7:35-7:40Am.
/in the US and work in consulting
With somewhat younger kids (preschool), they too are out the door by 07:35-07:40, but it's me who's walking them to their facilities, which means there's no way I could possibly start working before 09:00, or before 09:30 if I don't want to start on an empty stomach.
I saw that on the east coast, which is partly why I moved away.
In silicon valley my norm (for ~25 years) has been to start around 11am which is much more tolerable.