Ask Slashdot: Does Your Work Schedule Make You Unproductive? 311
debingjos writes "Management at my company seems to think that our developers can get extra work done if they work extra long days. However, as one of the devs in question, I don't agree. When I've been coding for eight hours, my pool of concentration is exhausted. Working overtime either fails to produce any extra code, or the quality of the code is very bad. What is the community's opinion on this? This can be broken out further into several questions: What are the maximum number of hours you can work in a day/week and still be reasonably productive? When you absolutely must work beyond that limit, what steps do you take to minimize degradation of quality? If you're able to structure your time differently from the typical 9-5 schedule, what method works best for you? Finally, how do you communicate the quality problems to management?"
Best is two shifts with some recovery time between (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Too Old (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
lol
True. It really varies by the individual, amount of sleep, consecutive days of intensive work, etc.
As a person with an executive function disorder it's much much easier for me to work for extended periods of time because I don't recognize the time passing. I'll go until I can't go anymore. That said it takes me a while to get into "code mode" so a schedule which is interrupted by meetings and other crap means a huge loss of productivity for me.
Re:I do get work done when I work late (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, I find that after the distractions of the office are gone, either because I am working at home or everybody has gone home, I can get a lot more done.
Agreed. I'm the most productive when everyone else has gone home. But I pay for it by being dull and generally unresponsive the next morning. I'm thinking it's like the old proverb, you can't make a string longer by cutting off a piece and tying it to the other end.
I think what we're saying is that there are productive hours and hours that you're required to ... be there ... and they're not necessarily the same hours.
The collateral damage of staying late is that the company will start *expecting* you to stay late.....
Studies say (Score:4, Interesting)
6 hours max per 24...
My experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I one took a job for a company developing a Futures Trading system, and they pushed us hard (at least 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week) in order to meet their imposed deadline.
We finally got the system to pass the entire test suite on a Sunday afternoon.
Monday morning, when I arrived at work, the outer office was full of boxes containing all of the personal belongings of the developers, along with the CFO, who was handing out pink slips.
Amazingly, they actually issued a press release boasting of how they had gotten rid of all of their expensive software developers since they were "done" with software development.
In 3 months, they were out of business.
Hope you fare better!
No job, no schedule, no worries (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm recently retired and loving it.
I'm currently building a kayak rack in my back yard without any deadlines.
Sometimes I just put down the tools and paddle off to check my crab pots.
At the start of every day I sit on my patio overlooking the water, drink my coffee and decide what (if anything) I will do for the rest of the day.
I wish I could have retired 40 years ago.
So long and thanks for the fish.
In my experience, yes (Score:4, Interesting)
One problem that IT folks often come across, especially with development jobs and especially at startups, is the expectation that long hours produce better results. Large companies also do this -- Google, Microsoft, etc. have on-site everything as a perk for employees, but also to keep them there for the maximum possible time. This works very well when you're just out of college -- you're used to working long hours to finish stuff, the dorm-like atmosphere is inviting, etc. But it really gets old when you're older, more established and have things outside of work like a marriage, family, etc.
Also, employers hate to add staff in IT roles because most of them see the entire function as a necessary evil. If you're in one of these places, you'll never get free of being called to fix stuff out of hours and working like crazy to put out fires. On top of that, many see themselves as "great places to work" and don't think that their workers feel any of this pain.
The one common myth throughout IT employment is that every place is like this. It isn't -- I happen to work for a place that allows flexible hours. And although we're lean in the staffing department and often have to work *a little* extra time, the workload isn't crushing. There are trade-offs, and people who work here know them. Pay isn't at the top of the range, the stuff we work on is typically not cutting edge (but not ancient either,) and the work our department does (systems integration) is very difficult if you don't have the right attitude/mindset/troubleshooting brain. In addition, those flexible hours get cashed in for marathon work sessions on very rare occasions. My company basically says "keep sane hours, make sure you're around for meetings, and we reserve the right to fly you halfway across the world if a disaster happens." I could get a job working myself to death for an investment bank or video game company, but I have a family at home now.
Seriously, not everywhere has a toxic culture. And yes, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who love working insane hours and have very little to do outside of work. That's why different companies have different work styles.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
management (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, management is a largely evidence-free space. Research on all your questions, and a thousand more, exists. 99% of managers don't seem to know anything about management nor people. Not in the way anyone else knows anything about their profession. That's largely because few people actually study management, most are something else by profession and were promoted to management positions, and if you're lucky they got two weeks of training.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
If you want to have a good job - leave. A company with that kind of management is unlikely to change.
If you can't or don't want to, buy your manager that book, or some other. Send it to his private address, anonymously. You don't want to embarass him. He most likely knows that he needs help, but he would never admit it.
It isn't the hours worked it is the environment (Score:2, Interesting)
I work for myself, so no one tells me when to start or stop working. I rent an office and work offsite most of the time so I'm able to come and go as I need to. In some sense I'm the extreme example of someone who is free to work whenever, however, and sometimes whereever I want to. The only complication is that fact that a few of my clients end up schedule regular (very useless) meetings on status. Apart from that I tend to work normal hours - 9 AM to 6 PM. Then, if I have the energy and the appetite I'll work at night and on (usually) several hours on the weekend.
In the end, when you own your own schedule you usually end up emulating a schedule that resembles a normal workday, but the main difference is that there is no one telling you when and where you need to be at what time. I find myself way more productive in this arrangement than I was when I worked at a traditional office job. Here are the side-effects:
1. I work way more than anyone I know, and I squeeze more productivity out of my day. When no one is telling you to come in all night to meet a deadline - guess what? You do it anyway and it doesn't feel bad.
2. If I'm having a bad day or if I want to take a day off, I do it and I don't feel bad about the decision making someone in HR think less of me.
3. I can get into the "zone" very easily because I don't have some pinhead HR jackass telling me to go to the lunchroom to celebrate all of the people with September birthdays.
If management is really interested in increasing productivity tell them to "Fuck off, and stop treating us like managed cattle." If you do that, you'll probably find yourself fired (which honestly might not be the worst thing in the world).
Studies show 8 hour days are a limit (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in hospital IT several years back. Hospitals routinely schedule doctors and nurses for 12 hour shifts 3 days a week.
While I was there a report was released that said that after extensive study of doctor and nurse patient care habits throughout their work day, they determined that the quality of patient care dropped sharply after 8 hours. During hours 9-12 the risk of being misdiagnosed (incompletely or inaccurately), administer incorrect medications (patient allergies or medication contraindications), administer incorrect dosages of medications, etc. The risks were almost double compared to the previous 8 hours. After hour 12 the risks got even worse. The study estimated that preventable accidents would fall over 75% by changing to four 8 hour days.
Unfortunately, the attitudes of doctors and nurses were that the quality of their patient care was just fine, and nobody wanted to give up the schedules that they currently had. The medical field has a culture of overworking yourself and working while tired, so they are highly resistant to change even in the face of such profound data revealing how destructive their behavior was to patient well-being.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Manage Milestones not Minutes (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for cutting through the clutter. I read through far too many comments arguing for this set of hours vs that set of hours. No one's family life is the same. No one's biorythms are the same. I've been a programmer, analyst, project manager, entrepreneur since the early 1980's and have learned that my teams performed best if their hours were self-managed. Even within the same individual I sometimes needed to work in small 50 minute increments and, at other times, in huge non-stop spurts with a satisfying 18 hour day.
These days, if I'm productive n hours, that's exactly how many hours I work. I'd make exceptions to this only to honor confirmed appointments and periodic team meetings.
Thanks, again, for a quality post!
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point. But everyone, and everyday is different. I've had inspired days when I worked 12 hours. My blood was up and concentration was good. I've had bad days when I caught up on email, admin, documenting, etc. no point in trying to code, nothing productive would result.
As a manager of a small dev team (and 'developer' myself more than 'manager'), I recognise this in my team and specifically have different kinds of work available depending on the 'mood' that the guys are in. Someone's having a great head-down-and-churn-out-awesome-code day, I'll let them go at it until they're done. Someone's having a blergh-can't-seem-to-even-handle-basic-refactoring day, they can maybe double-check some documentation, or read up on some new technology that might be useful to us, or something else.
I also recognise that some days the hearts and minds simply aren't in it at all. For this reason, we don't have fixed work hours - come in when you want, leave when you want, do your 38.5 hours per week (and if you do more, you can take it off later as time in lieu).
Yes, this can lead to delays on projects, but that's my job as the team manager to sort out. When I tell marketing/whoever about schedules, it's my job to take in to account that people in my team have good days and bad days. I'll build that in to my estimate (and therefore occasionally finish a bit earlier than 'scheduled', giving us time for a bit of spit-and-polish on some non-core parts; or help out on other projects that aren't looking so good).
Occasionally, I've had some difficult conversations with my management about why they saw my employees engaged in a network game instead of working, but again - it's my responsibility to take care of that and my superiors can't fault us on quality of output. My team of course are generally pretty happy with the work environment and I take that as a matter of pride being the one providing it to them.