I worked for a startup where the founder/CEO mandated 40 hours of work a week, no more or less.

He would always say “I want you to work your ass off while you’re here but I also don’t want you taking this home with you. The company is paying you for forty hours of your time a week.”

The expectation, which everyone seemed to find fair enough, was that if you didn’t have enough to fill 40 hours that you find other projects to help with or tinker with new ideas.

Honestly it was a great culture and they had a sizable acquisition exit so I guess it worked even as the company got north of 600ish employees by the time they were bought.

Was everyone honest about it? No of course not, but enough were that people bought in.

There is no incentive to find ways to accomplish more or better other than personal drive then, though (and personal drive eventually wears thin on its own, imho). If you have to work 40 hours, even if you get everything done early (in which case you gotta take the next task from the list, a never ending grind -- when do you get to celebrate a job well done?), even if you're head isn't in it (maybe you're not feeling well, or have something else going on, or are just bored, or have a day of mental block), you gotta get your hours in. Even if you have some very focused productive days and get everything done in record time, you gotta get your hours in.

I think I often push work without realizing it, but I feel that often I'm done around 16.00 or before lunch.

If I know I have to be there anyways, I might as well goof off a little.

If no-one cared about the hours but I just had hard deliverables every day/week/month, I'd work much faster so I can go home earlier.

Depends on the project, too. Some I'm more interested in than others.

Yeah. I’d also add that goofing off isn’t ok, in the sense that it’s time that’s wasted typically on unimportant time wasters while if you could get off early you could use that time for something useful, like spending it with family or on exercise or a hobby. But you can’t do those things because you’re still technically on the clock, so spend the time on HN or twitter or whatever instead, not helping yourself or your employer.

+1. Outside hourly contractors, if you have a clear sense of what impact/outcome you're seeking, time of day or number of hours shouldn't matter. Often I suspect it's a proxy for NOT having a clear idea of the desired outcomes. Removing a requirement for "8 hours a day" can even be a good forcing function to ensure you DO have a clear and well-communicated set of goals and outcomes. Indexing on time (IMHO) can also have unwanted side effects like people just filling in the time "because they have to", which is pointless for everyone involved.

Consider the practice of "work to rule".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Precisely defining what at employee is to do is not really practical. At some point it's always going to be "do what I mean, not what I say."

I limit our employees work to 40 hours a week so we don't have burn out. I want people to work hard and then go home.

So far, so good: Our employees are constantly coming up with better ways of doing things - with less stress, hassle, and annoyance. Over the last three years, our works has gone from suffering 40 hours to an enjoyable but hard-working 40 hours. Our retention rate has gone from 40% to 95%.

I need to be explicit - it's timed to both time and deliverables. 40 hours of productive work - productivity is defines and delivering value to the customer. The customer can be internal.

We don't work overtime and only one person is on call (wait time is paid at time and a half) on Saturday.

I need to be explicit - it's to both time and deliverables. 40 hours of productive work - productivity is defines and delivering value to the customer. The customer can be internal.

We don't work overtime and only one person is on call (wait time is paid at time and a half) on Saturday.

This didn't answer the question

Whether this benefits the employee or employer more is very case-specific. Without any rules, even productive people are tempted to work longer hours. They may feel guilty about not being more productive, since this has more to do with emotional state than a realistic idea of how your work compares with others.

Setting limits on how long people work could have a better impact in terms of work-life balance than being able to quit early once in a while.

Work and hard work.

We all know it's easy to "work" as in get "stuff done" but "hard work" is the basis of our economy. Part of the problem is the notion of hardness, a dimensionless constant on the Moh scale which you can look up elsewhere. Difficulty, as in the complexity of thought required to predict a system, is another matter altogether. We should speak instead of power, the ability to perform work quickly.

I know a few powerful thinkers. Give them a problem and they'll return an appreciation quickly. An answer will follow, and more thereafter, until things settle, and they can share their understanding.

One of the most useful techniques in this regard is contextualisation, whereby we physically, perhaps synesthaestically, abstract ourselves from our abstractions by being with, and learning from, each other. Think of children and think of Alan Kay.

Children put in all their time to being children. When we're employed we're employed as adults. Eight hours of work is equivalent to eight hours of cooking and cleaning, or playing and teaching, of exploring and learning. When we pay each other to be adults we maintain all the rest of society.

Paid by hour or minute we're best off working as autonomous heroes for the greater good.

I love hacker news, smart people share politely. I can show my Mother on occasion. But Hacker News is still just a bit of a cuter slashdot with pretentions of lambdatheultimate and a healthy dash of shtetloptimised, downed with a bit of whatever you're having yourself.

> Unless they’re contractors/consultants who bill by the hour, of course.

Unless an 8 hour day of work was part of the agreement of the job.

There's no more to it than that. You signed up for an 8 hour work day. An emergency situation in which you work from home isn't going to change that.

Otherwise, why would you peg your performance to the lowest common denominator.

> Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables?

Once you make a deliverable the metric, work interaction and innovation suffers.

Say Bob finishes assigned Task-A in six hours. However Alice is struggling with her Task-B and could do with some of Bob's Java expertise. But in a deliverable-driven environment, Bob's done and clocks out. See ya Alice!

Or Alice is waiting for an informal reply from Trent, but Trent's reply is not a manager-assigned deliverable so he doesn't bother responding. He wants to press ahead and get Task-C finished so that he can clock out.

Instead of focusing on deliverables, most employers therefore focus on 'time dwelling' in the hope that people will interact and share the work burden.

You generally don't hire people who are twice as capable as the existing team by accident. Tech companies invest enormously in sourcing, selecting, and closing people like that. They want to see a return. If you're just going to calibrate your performance to the median, they could have spent less time and money hiring someone cheaper and less talented

I guess I'd understand if the company were not trying to "innovate" or "raise the bar" or anything, just fulfill some mundane requirements at the lowest cost, and paid accordingly.

Quite possibly the work is time base, not delivery based. Eg. A call center employees might need to be on-call (time) even if there are no active calls (deliverables).

That's a fair point and certainly a reasonable reason to mandate hours. Thanks for pointing it out.

employees are billed by the hour. that's how employment is defined in most countries. it's a payment for about 40 hours of work per week.

one of the key points of employment is that i get s reliable salary regardless of my performance. sure, if my performance is continuously very bad then my employer may want to make an adjustment (or let me go) and likewise if my performance is good i may expect a raise.

in general that stability of income is more important than the ability to go home earlier. because the latter means that i have to work more if things don't go well because deliverables are often hard to define. in IT at least. what do you count? lines of code? number of issues closed?

one week i may close a dozen issues, the next week a single task may have stumped me, requiring me to do days of research.

deliverables reslly only work on a large scale: "finish this project" or for a sysadmin: "keep the servers running". my customer or employer doesn't care how many hours i spend on that. if there are no problems then i am free, or i may get a bonus for closing a project early.

Most of the jobs with well-defined deliverables that can be completed in a few hours are pretty tedious, and they are the sort of job whose workers are most easily exploited with sweatshop tactics and in the gig economy.

Some companies also have to bill their customers by the hour. For example certain government contracts, grants and even private contracting are paid out based on hours worked.