Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a while to establish themselves (and a reputation).
The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer hours, though those hours are more productive because they know the ropes.
There is a sweet spot where someone knows enough to be productive but isn't yet complacent. This is the spot that every employer dreams of: employees cranking, full speed, productively, for 8 hours.
It's just not sustainable. You can fire people and try and keep turning over staff such that everyone stays in that sweet spot, but you'll eventually end up with a different sort of headache when your staff has no organizational memory for why decisions were made. The people who built things and have the long-term visions have left, and those who pick up the torch try will never have the same big-picture in their head.
The challenging bit is how do you separate someone who works 3h a day because that's all they can sustain (and they're just being realistic), and those who work 3h a day, could work more, but chooses not to? I'm not sure you want to force either out, but can you incentivize the latter to produce more?
If your 3-hour-could-be-8 made adequate contribution, whatever that is, that's enough. If it takes them 8 to get to where the other is, incentives will push them to do so.
This works great until you PIP an underperforming female, minority, or person over 40.
The discrimination lawsuits will make the company regret their progressive stances.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I have seen this happen.
The median outcome is a settlement with no admission of guilt (usually because it’s cheaper than the alternatives), and the person now has a job for life or is given severance until they get a comparable position elsewhere (and they won’t be rushing).
(1) leads you down the path of padding estimates so you don't miss. It also means if you finish early you don't really want to pull in more stories. That tells people you're padding estimates and they'll push you to lower estimates or take on more stories. Then when you need that padding it's not there. So if you finish your work on Wednesday it's better to chill and look busy instead of doing more.
(2) is just obviously bad. Delivering complicated projects and supervising other employees makes you look better. So projects get complicated and teams get bloated.
*Crank out code should probably be "build functionality according to good practices" but doesn't really change the point.
Looking at my day as a carpenter, then:
- 30 minutes break
- 30 minutes startup/cleanup
- 1 hour moving stuff/between jobs
- 6 hours ostensibly working; 4-5 hours focused
And what I expect of SDEs, now:
- 1 hour breaks
- 1-2 hours communicate (email, CRs, meetings, etc)
- 1 hour continuing education/corporate overhead
- 4-5 hours writing code/tasks
I’m always skeptical when I hear people are doing more than around 4 hours of coding a day — and start to wonder what’s being skipped.
Every single study done on it shows that creative staff (including engineers) are more productive working where they are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least productive environment, etc. So it's utterly unsurprising that people get more productive working from home and can do 8 hour's office work in 5 hours at home.
But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave Slack on and go do something useful. It's not only that WFH gives people more time, it's that it removes the "you must pretend to be busy for 25% of your workday" restriction.
As always, a negative reaction to WFH is a sign of bad management culture. Good managers are happy that their people are getting more done and happier about it. Bad managers see "they're only doing 20 hours a week if they work from home!" and are angry about it.
Do you have any specific sources on hand (preferably a good meta-study)? I've heard this claim a lot, and I'd like it to be true, but I've never seen it sourced. Also, I feel like it could depend a lot on the individual, but anecdote is not data.
And yes, open-plan offices truly suck.
It's one of those well-known truths ("diverse teams are more productive" is another one) that's well-supported by the literature and generally agreed on, but still comes up as "needs citation" every time. I should go dig out the citation so I can avoid this when I bring it up ;)
The objections to WFH tend to come from managers who manage by insisting their employees do at least 40 hours in the office each week, rather than measuring actual output and productivity, because it's easier. A similar question is: If you're super efficient and get your work done quickly, can you end your day early and go home?
In your GP comment, you say "But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave Slack on and go do something useful."
I think I agree with your second paragraph entirely.
To me, two issues are being conflated here: the location of the work (wfh vs office) and the length of the work day. The benefits of wfh you are describing sound like they could more or less also come from a 6 hour work day. Ignoring commute time (it's an issue, but just for simplicity's sake). You'd be able to do useful things around your house just the same if you were in an office for 6 hours and able to go home.
Some would describe what you're saying as "slacking" for those hours outside the six, but I don't see it that way. Instead, wfh has become a socially acceptable vehicle for a shorter work day. It allows workers to achieve a shorter work day while bypassing those arguments. I think productive discussion around the issue is impossible until these issues are disentangled.
this is the core issue - are you hired to do 8 hours of work, or are you hired to complete a set of tasks?
if the former, then yes, you're slacking off if you stop after 6 hours
if the latter, then no, as soon as you're done with those tasks then you have completed your day's work and can go do something else.
old-skool authoritarian management tends towards the former, and tends to measure time-at-desk rather than actual productivity. Hence they don't like WFH because it forces the latter.
It's this idiocy that you can convert time into software at a fixed rate that got us into this mess.
For instance, there was talk of a team structure with one programmer and everyone else in specialized, supporting roles. That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor.
Rightly so. Job hopping is much easier in the software industry now than it was when that book was written. Average tenure in software jobs is significantly lower than the average for all professions, and even that general average is only around 4 years.
Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this into their 50’s.
> Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments.
A surprising portion of that work is random menial stuff, they don't actually end up doing 40hr/week of mentally demanding work.
> Plus, they do this into their 50’s.
The ones that survive to make partner do. But its well-known that BigLaw absolutely burns through associates. Very few BigLaw associates make it past 35, most eventually leave for saner pastures of corporate counsel/government/etc jobs.
How much you bill and how much you work aren't necessarily the same. Why would you think they are?
You have to open the file, find the email you were going to respond to, double check with whoever that the answer is “yes”, look up the other attorney’s phone number, double check your calendar to make sure the date works, call you spouse to make sure they can pick up the kids that day, and then call the other attorney.
If you think Biglaw clients, with in house counsel that used to be at biglaw, blindly pay padded bills at $800/hr, you are mistaken.
Not sure if this is changing with all the time tracking software now but it's easier to bill by tenths than it is to track/calculate exact minutes and any larger unit might involve too much rounding up. e.g. .1 for a quick email reply is more palatable than a .25 (1/4 hour, 15min) minimum.
The idea that the human brain hits some brick wall at the scheduled 40 hour work week and can't do anymore thinking is comical
Sure. Do this if you want to kill morale and be chronically understaffed (either not enough bodies or not enough qualified bodies) for the rest of your existence.
This type of mentality breeds mediocrity for a number of reasons, the main one being that A-players will run away from teams/companies structured around these heuristics. Furthermore, they will make sure all of their A-player friends are aware of this environment.
Good managers and good management teams have no issues with productivity of in-office or remote workers. If your team or company is actually having productivity issues (rather than using productivity as a precursor to a rif), then point that finger at the management and management culture.