For many the commute more than hits your daily stress quota, even before work contributes. So you can end up starting your day stressed, be that public transport sardines and delays or playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt.

This to reach an office at some arbitrary time everybody seems to follow of the 8/9am start. Hence you have this sudden rush into cities around that time and again with the bulk leaving home in the early evening.

Travel outside those hours or against the commuter grain are such a joy, that the contrast is huge.

Whilst many companies offer flexible hours, they are still the exception and until more flexibility becomes more widespread along with home working or local hub/satellite office working. Such stress will play more and more a factor.

I'd dare say that having a stressful commute alone can on many levels kill of your entire morning productivity. Then you have the costs, adding more stress. Again costs that would be much cheaper (public transport trains here in the UK) if you travel outside peak hours. But then, roads much more pleasant off peak.

But a 4 day week can sure make a difference over a 5 day one. Working longer hours for 4 days, avoiding some of that peak commute stress and focusing on work, for those days and giving yourself 3 days of freedom. It is a fine balance over having 5 days of self imposed stress if your late home and the impact upon a social life. Which means you end up with a less quality social life and/or work life and by this approach you get quality time with both. Though not always suitable for all, it's more palatable for companies who are less flexible. At least what I've found. Though again, depends upon your job.

> Working longer hours for 4 days, avoiding some of that peak commute stress ...

You're spot on here. The option to travel before/after the rush makes a world of difference.

I'm a freelancer/consultant and I've found that when I'm working as a "vendor", as opposed to a "temporary employee" working on-site during normal business hours, and only need to be on-site for meetings and such, I don't mind commuting at all and actually look forward to heading into the city. Novelty aside, I'm sure this is because I'm usually traveling before (heading to a cafe to prepare for an early meeting) or after (late meeting) the rush and can find a seat, have room to breath, etc. However, when I'm stuck doing the 8/9/10-5/6/7 commute, I find the train/subway ride (and myself) miserable.

As a consultant I'd bill my hourly rate for travel to and from the customer's office. This achieves two things:

1. Reduces stress, because all of a sudden your commute is not a total waste of time

2. Makes your client feel better about you working from home

I wish I had the guts to add this sort of stipulation to my (non-existent) standard contract.

It's usually not even in the contract (most contracts were supplied by customer). Contracts usually have something to the effect that the customer will pay for travel. You can justify this by saying that because your place of business (usually your home or office) isn't nearby, and your work does not require you to be on-site, you will charge for the actual time spent on travel to and from customer site. You have to be firm on this, and be prepared to walk away if they refuse. I haven't once encountered any pushback, though, even though my hourly rate was pretty high. Also, where I couldn't park for free, I'd pass through parking as an expense. Clients are cool with that too. Somehow they don't allow any of this shit for regular employees, for reasons that I don't quite understand. :-)

> Somehow they don't allow any of this shit for regular employees, for reasons that I don't quite understand.

It's because contractors are capex and employees are opex. I'm on a staff augmentation contract at a rate 2x the salary cap for the most senior employees. They keep begging me to convert but can't because I would be taking a $100,000 pay cut. It's a ridiculous situation.

> most contracts were supplied by customer

This is precisely why I don't have a standard contract -- which, after doing this for a number of years, still seems very odd to me. A while back, I hired a lawyer to revise and amend a contract _supplied by customer_ only to have it rejected because of the time and effort it would have taken their lawyers to review/revise/amend my changes. As I understand it, this same line of reasoning would also prevent (most) of my clients from signing a contract presented by me. This makes businesses sense, and I've since learned that it's standard practice, but I resent that I'm the one who has to make the take-it-or-leave-it decision about whether to work _for_ this client, as opposed to _with_ this client.

> playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt

I spent 5 years making a 1 hour (each way) commute by car, a distance of 8 miles (also each way). It was soul destroying! Wasting 2 hours of my life every workday just felt so meaningless!

Eventually I moved out of the city to a small town 10 miles out of the city, and only then did I realise just how awful it had been. I'm now lucky enough to work from home 3 days a week and work 1 day in the office - and it's only a 20-25 minute drive.

8 miles is a 30 minute bicycle ride (for me) in the city, and my city is in the top 5 by worst traffic in the world. Except for winter time, I never use a car to go to work, it would take me 1.5-2 hours for 10 miles (in each direction). There are options bicycles and scooters.

I was in a Scottish city of only 200k people, so not nearly the worst by any stretch, but still bad enough to result in soul-destroying journey times during rush hour :(

Unfortunately, cycling isn't an option for everyone.

When I read soul destroying I was certain the punchline is that you'd later started cycling, making commutes both enjoyable and beneficial. Alas, I was wrong.

> you'd later started cycling, making commutes both enjoyable and beneficial

Some times of the year (in many places, half or less), and only if you have showers in your office.

YMMV. I live in Finland, and I ride a bike almost every day of the year. Last winter the temperatures went below -20˚C and I still took the bike, and enjoyed it. Granted there are maybe three months a year when it takes dedication. And yes you do need a shower unless you have an electric bike.

8 miles in 1 hour? I’d take up running because it’s be quicker at a not too unreasonable pace.

Why aren't more "knowledge workers" able to work from home 2 or 3 days a week?

I know some people have noisy kids/distractions at home, but seems like it would work for many engineers. Yet every company I've been at, I suggest it, and people give me a sarcastic look like, "yeah, right, we can't do that!"

Possibly a fear that not being seen at work will hamper advancement?

More commonly it is felt that not being seen at work and plugged in to every decision will make you a target for dismissal.

You could set up a large live display of your github contributions calendar. Or some type of holographic telepresence.

Or just be overly-active in email/chat.

Those things do not matter to the kind of people targeting other people on this irrational basis. What matters is that they have a vague feeling that you are "around" and "a contributor" and "one of us" (feel free to be a bit sick in your mouth at this point).

It's called human resources for a reason - maximize short-term profit while minimizing legal exposure... the same respect we give any other resources.

The 40-hour work week was seen as a step towards ever shorter workdays and weeks thanks to technology. I realize many people now work longer hours, but that should be seen as a problem instead of a fact of life.

> making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning

such a great point. we seem to live in a zero-planning world now.

i'm surprised at how often, at least in app programming projects, i go to great lengths to show a manager how the app is progressing and where it's ultimately heading, and get no meaningful course correction or even a "that looks great"

then, the other shoe drops: after the app is complete and ready (or even after it's gone live) -- only then -- do they take the time to actually look at it and demand a change. and they don't care that it's harder to accomplish at that late stage, or that it damages programmer morale. they actually consider that to be a valid process.

It's largely identical in enterprise programming.

I have a lovely and smart boss but I can not get him to look at stuff properly until after I roll out a potentially massive change to our internal ERP.

Real money on the line as well.

I think a lot of it is that non-programming managers don't really grok on the intrinsic level the vast complexity that can be under the skin of a seemingly simple change.

In fact that is largely our job I guess, to hide all that complexity, when a user selects "order following required stock from supplier" they don't need to know what is happening under neath, they just care about price and when it'll be delivered on a container to one of our sites.

Somehow this even happens with programming managers. I feel like we have a real crisis of leadership in software development.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

That's mostly because managers underrate the concept of 'optimization' and how features are interconnected. Once a developer makes a mistake, all other things already working, gets broken. Small changes are not so small after all. They need to be understood as a whole, instead of individual updates.

Start with UI mock-ups first before writing any back end code. Schedule review meetings and specifically ask management to approve all major elements. Take detailed meeting minutes documenting that approval and send those to all the internal stakeholders. With that paper trail it becomes more difficult to request major changes later.

> ...a zero-planning world now...

JIT is for more than just compilers these days!

It was in fact not about compilers to begin with: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_manufacturing

Crazy idea: what if management was a licensed, regulated career, like traditional engineering, or being a nurse. Like if you have more than 5 "direct reports", you need to get a certification?

I don't think there's any link between certification and competency.

Here in Australia we're going mad for certifications. I had a friend who looked after kids in an after school program. A minimum wage job, but one that she loved. She'd been doing it for nearly 20 years. The government mandated that she needed a $2500 certificate in order to continue to do the job she'd been doing for two decades.

I don't believe there was anything that this certification could have taught her that she didn't already know. Heck, she should have been the one teaching the course. Instead it was being run by an organisation that specialised in running these kinds of certification programs, but certainly didn't specialise in the subject matter.

If we were to mandate certification for managers, my concern would be that - at best - it would end up as just another piece of paper. At worst, it would actively exclude the people who were most qualified and competent, like it did with my friend.

Something like that happened to my mother. She is a teacher in HS. She also happens to teach some courses for teachers in training that are going to teach the same courses she teaches herself. But now, since new decree/law, she can't teach in HS anymore. She still teaches to teachers though. So she's seeing younger teachers she teaches taking her job.

Teaches everywhere.

Your friend sounds like an outlier in these circumstances; the certification is more likely to be of benefit to those fresh to the field, and in the field of child-care (and aged care also), I think some bare minimum requirement of capability is warranted.

Professional training organisations may not have direct experience with the subject matter, but given a good curriculum prepared by someone who DOES have experience, I don't see why they couldn't deliver a reasonable result. I agree that any "Q and A" sessions, or questions along the lines of "What is it really like working as a..." would not be that useful, though.

Certification is just a moat to protect jobs and stave off regulation.

Crazier idea: don’t make management the only route to higher salary, pushing loads of incompetent people into it for purely monetary reasons. Reward highly skilled employees for their skill set and experience.

The thing is, highly skilled employees are only effective if they work in a coordinated manner towards a common goal, and the people in charge of coordinating the teams are... Managers.

To put it differently, in a 6-man team each employee is responsible and held accountable for around 1/6th of the productivity, but the team manager is responsible and accountable for 100% of the effort.

Hence managers earning higher salaries.

The manager is not responsible for doing any work, only meta work. The metric of work output measures mgmt value input indirectly. You need to look at their actual interaction and analyse the meta work they do directly to get a true account of the value a manager provides.

I think it is mostly an issue caused by how managers are evaluated. Do the teams you supervise outperform (in a short-term metric set) the other teams? If so, you are deemed a good manager.

Upper management usually does not seem to care whether the people you manage leave the company eventually or try to change teams to get away from you.

Are you suggesting that people with management training generally have happier workers?

I would be interested to know if that is actually the case.

Yeah let's further reduce the ability to switch job, there are already so many opportunities...

> 8 hours

I just refused to join a conference call on Saturday (opting instead to watch my son’s soccer game), and I know I’ll have to answer for it on Monday.

Good for you! Stand up for yourself if they ask, use words like “inappropriate” and “disrespectful” to describe scheduling a conference call on a Saturday.

Yeah, that’s the problem though, isn’t it, as you’re damned either way - either you miss out on time with your son, or you spend the remainder of your weekend anxious about whether you’re going to be tarred, feathered and fired on Monday.

I chose to forgo children as they would have been a distraction from work. Now it’s too late. Ah well.

It takes a certain amount of self-respect to raise the middle finger to unreasonably-timed work requests, and it says a lot about modern work culture that a lot of people have been cowed into thinking they have no options.

Yeah but the job market in IT is so good there is no need to worry. If you aren’t being treated like a star you can move on to where you are appreciated.

Answer them with a referral for (them) a visit to a therapist. Working weekends is pathological.

Agreed. The flaw in this article is that it talks about overwork as a given and as a solution offers some measures that can help you individually cope with stress while doing nothing to the overall atmosphere. The idea of reorganizing a workspace so that it is more humane is seemingly too radical.

I am currently recovering from a mild burnout. Self-diagnosed, but I had surely felt a lot of exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness. The curious thing is that I didn't even work that much! (In the end I barely worked at all because I couldn't). What caused it in my opinion was not overwork but the combination of sociopathic senior leadership and an incompetent immediate boss. The senior leadership tried hard to institute a culture of self-blame and fostered the feeling that you were never doing enough while my immediate boss had a preference for the "zerg-rush" style of software development with little design and planning, constantly changing priorities, "motivation" by unrealistic schedules and disregard for quality control (that resulted in several entirely preventable production outages). He also did little to shield us from outside distractions and expected an "always on" attitude (he would message us in the wee hours of the Sunday morning and expect a timely response). All this pushed me hard towards burnout.

In the end I decided to quit my job (high salary be damned) and go on a sabbatical. Already I feel a lot better and am starting to regain some of the interest I had in programming.