I've never understood required hours. Because sometimes 20 hrs in a week is a lot. Other times 60 is no time at all. Those weeks where 20 are a lot I am extremely distracted and the next day I am not excited for work. The weeks where 60 is no time, most of that is productive and I want to go to work. Judging work by number of hours just seems like a poor metric.

>I've never understood required hours.

They want you there to answer questions.

Workplaces value availability because it's too difficult to design coherent systems and to document them. Instead of that boring old stuff, in the modern workplace, we go fast and break things (or never get them fully working in the first place).

Then we expect workers to be always around so they can be reached on slack when there is a problem.

Yeah, but with modern technology everyone is almost always reachable.

And that's an unwelcome intrusion into my time off.

But hey, I like surfing, and you can't 'reach' a person while they are surfing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't put company email or company chat (slack) on my phone.

Would you if it gave you more time flexibility? And could set it to only chats for you, not group?

Not at all. When I leave the office, I want to leave work concerns along with it. My off time is for me, not my employer.

More than half of my work is time and materials work (as opposed to a fix bid project), and so it's directly billed to the client. My putting in hours is directly proportional to how much the company makes.

I don't like it either, and I feel like I could contribute a lot more effectively on the fixed price items if I wasn't constantly scrounging up T&M work, maybe I'd even have time to think up decent solutions instead of justifying why I have to spend another 2 hours on issue #blah, but it's an example of why required hours exist.

yes, a poor metric but a measurable, quantifiable metric common to all regardless of their individual capacities in a given time.

I don't believe this. Because your managers generally know who is a good worker and who isn't. The rest of the workers definitely know.

I don’t think that there are many people who can code in a concentrated manner for more than, say, 6 hours per day. There are days when I manage 8 hours of actual coding, but those are not my favorite ones - I only do those under immense deadline pressure, and with all the interruptions it means sitting at a screen for 10-12 hours. Such days leave me exhausted for 2-3 days after. Not sure why, but the brain is a muscle after all, and it can get sore.

I got sidetracked.. what I mean is that you need HN, Facebook etc to prevent you from using too much of that precious brain power. Maybe this is different for other areas of work, but IMO it should make not much of a difference whether you are forced to stay at work for 35 or 45 hours - you just will procrastinate more.

Update: Added “more than”.

The brain is an organ. If I could flex my brain, I would!

Of course it is. I think we all know how brains work physiologically (at least basically).

But use it, and it will tire. Forget to pause and it will tire faster. And neurotransmitters are not an endless resource.

Just because it's not an endless resouce doesn't mean it's a muscle. Your liver isn't an endless resource.

The half of the world that includes the US is well into the evening now, so I’d imagine most of HN is surely not still at work.

Asia, Australia/New Zealand are well awake and almost at the end of their working day :)