Because there is a very strong negative correlation between overworking and productivity / quality of work. When I've been line managing people I find that if they work over 40-45 hours a week their actual productivity (as opposed to their self perceived productivity) starts to fall off a cliff after a couple of weeks, so I ask people to only work their hours. I've sometimes had to implement technical measures to enforce this when someone gets too obsessive about their work(and have done it to myself a couple of times!). I've never had to fire anyone for working too much and dragging down productivity in a team but I've come close a couple of times.

> Because there is a very strong negative correlation between overworking and productivity / quality of work

Working outside of business hours is not the same as overworking.

I have some days packed with meetings and calls, and I actually find it refreshing/relaxing to work on more down to earth matters in the evenings or weekend.

Sometimes I even take vacations just to code on some work-related projects that I find super interesting and wouldn't have enough focused/dedicated time on normal business days.

Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO. I choose my work places because I genuinely like what I would do there.

I will even go further: If I end up with colleagues that are _not_ genuinely interested in what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job, I don't want to work with these people. Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand that there are gruntwork places out there, where the job is writing braindead CRUD apps all day long, and I wouldn't want to think about it after-work. But then again, I wouldn't work there on the first place.

    Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain
    after 6pm.

Why do you think that the only options are:

1. Thinking about work

or

2. Shutting your brain down

If I want to go hack on some Clojure after work, when the day job is in Python, then what's wrong with that?

> If I want to go hack on some Clojure after work, when the day job is in Python, then what's wrong with that?

That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

Realistically, you will spend more engineering time on your job than on your hobby project.

From my experience, that means my out-of-working-hours projects tend to be driven by needs or limitations I encounter at work.

I then find it more optimal to embrace and leverage that relationship between during-working-hours and out-of-working-hours projects.

This is the best of both worlds, you get work on more green field projects, have flexibility to choose what you work on, under the constraint that it solves something for your job, but under the assumption that your side projects are anyway often inspired by work, it's a fit by construction.

Let me give you an example:

Some years ago I used to manage some high performance computing cluster, with storage nodes attached to compute nodes as the jobs were very IO intensive. We used glusterfs, which at the time got acquired by RH and maintenance stopped. Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition). That's an example of an out-of-working-hours project, inspired by work, that got used at work, and thus counts as work, while still being very interesting.

This is just an example, but overall I kept that mentality and have been doing that kind of things for more than a decade. You just need to find the right job where you have 1) interesting problems to solve that inspires you to do more 2) the freedom to push your projects 3) the drive to work out of office hours to prove that your projects are worth it and push them.

All the colleagues I have respect for do the same. And someone that does not have this spirit, for me, is not someone I want to work with.

    That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a
    not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

If the day job were Clojure, I'd be hacking in Python in my spare time. Or some other language (Rust, Haskell, etc.). Or not even hacking at all, but reading a book, or doing something else. The entire point of having hobby projects for me is that they're not what I'm working on during the day. They're an opportunity to broaden my horizons.

    Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our
    issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading
    papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork
    (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition).

That just sounds like a lot of unpaid overtime to me. It sounds like you enjoyed it, but I'd find that experience absolutely miserable. Working intensely on a project is great, but I need time where I'm thinking about something completely different, otherwise I burn out fast.

The difference is a a single question: “do you have family/kids?” This is also the main reason for ageism in the industry, where employers prefer to hire younger people.

I love programming, but I love my family even more.

And that's why I only work about half the day during 9-5, and the other half after 6pm. Because little kids don't disappear from 9-5pm and I like spending time with them.

I have a wife and a kid.

Do you spend 100% of the your non-working hours with them?

I manage to have a job, spend time with my wife, my kid, learn guitar, code & think on my free time, and I run 3 times a week.

I don't watch TV though ;}

How many hours per night do you sleep and how much per week do you spend on each of those listed endeavours? No attack, just curious

I sleep around 7h per night, sometimes 8h.

I do 1 to 3 runs per week, between 45m and 1h15 each.

I have a guitar teacher coming 2h/week, the rest of my practice is random: could be from 0 to 6h per week.

Since I basically WFH 100%, I have no commute time, which helps a lot.

> Sometimes I even take vacations just to code on some work-related projects that I find super interesting

> what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job

> Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO

Look, I continue to code and study in my free time, and I am still passionate about learning SoftEng and CompSci fundamentals, but the shit you're saying sounds super-sad and I definitely wouldn't want to work with someone who takes vacations to work on _work_ problems, either.

I'll take a seasoned and passionate engineer who has a family (even though I don't have one!) and has to work around that any time of day. In the vein of what GP was saying, bounds on limited resources like time can produce very effective work habits and conversely, seeing time as an unbounded resource (which is a phallacy anyway) sounds like the recipe to have a culture of sociopaths.

I'm 62 and have been in this industry for 40+ years. The BIGGEST regret in my entire life has been the time I spent as a young man working stupid hours on "super important" jobs, and missing seeing much of my kids growing up.

First, very funny that with each comment the author is older. Second, I’m 33 and regret yet. I misunderstood every customer is king with every customer is important and has the right to call me outside of work.

I worked 7 years about 60-70 hours each weak for customers which „are so important“ to work at weekends.

No one will give you the time back you could have spend better by developing yourself, family time or staring your own carrier. But working for a company is most of the times lost time.

"First, very funny that with each comment the author is older."

Yeah, not quite as quick off the mark as you youngsters :-).

I posted a similar comment to yours in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27065714

Whatever you do with your life, you'll always regret not doing something else.

Grass is always greener.

> I choose my work places because I genuinely like what I would do there.

That's great and so do I, but I still don't see that as reason to work in my free time. I do some personal projects as well, and those are usually even more interesting but also more beneficial for myself. Of course I still think about stuff from work now and then, maybe I see an interesting solution when casually surfing the web, but I'm not going to do more about that than write a note for the next work day.

> Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Citation needed

You’re either:

- management pretending to be a wagie as a psyop

- extremely privileged and never had to grit your teeth to pay the bills

- going to have a rude awakening when the crop of younger millennials and Gen Z hits your workplace and you realize these bright young things with dreams and desires are only in software because it’s one of the few lucrative careers left in this proto-fascist shithole of a dying civilization.

This is pretty extremist. If you think this is proto-fascist, you must not be aware of what fascism is like. As far as a “shithole” or “dying” civilization, I mean what is an example from of civilizations that are tremendously better or more “living?” I would agree that leftist culture is pretty depressing but I GenZ is a good example of the kind of generation that subsequent generations will react against, though it takes time. As far as Gen Z “hitting the workplace,” the kind programmers you’re talking about don’t seem to know a lot about computing other than React and mashing up APIs; I’m not sure “older” engineers that know things need to be that concerned.

Income inequality and social stratification have both increased dramatically in my lifetime, and QoL and resilience of various systems necessary for civilization have decreased.

As far as fascism goes, as you say, these things need time… but I’m sure a yet unwritten history book can enlighten you, right next to the passage on the gen Z backlash.

This is not really relevant, I was merely provoking emotional response for rhetorical effect (a useful and effective tool in the business/realpolitik toolkit)

And I’m sure these younger engineers are happy collecting their paycheques, scheming their schemes and thinking of what to disrupt next with all the free time they have because they roll their eyes at guff like the parent comment. Maybe that’s how we can all be happy.

    If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm
    makes you sick, why did you pick it?

Doing anything continuously for long periods without rest is unhealthy, and leads to both declining physical and mental health. Working 10-12 hour days is something that you can do for a short burst, but if you're doing it for months on end, it will negatively impact you.

    I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very
    often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the
    day or weekend or vacation

I think about code too, but it's rarely work code. It's usually about some hobby project or interesting algorithm that I've picked up.

I think your comment actually proves my point.

You are admitting that you do think about code outside working hours, though you don't consider it to be work because.. it's code for a hobby project?

That's not a valid point to me. What if your job was open enough that you could find dozens of interesting fun things to code on the side?

That's the job you should be looking for.

    What if your job was open enough that you could find dozens of interesting
    fun things to code on the side?

No job is that open. From your other comment in this thread:

    I have  some days  packed with meetings  and calls, and  I actually  find it
    refreshing/relaxing to work on more down to earth matters in the evenings or
    weekend.

I guess I'm fortunate in that I don't really have that many meetings or calls, and I don't have to spend my weekends and evenings doing programming. I get to do mostly programming during the day. Then, in my off hours, I have the option of programming. But I also have the option of doing other things, like watching TV or reading a book, or going for a bike ride.

> No job is that open

Mine is.

I guess with a sample size of 1, I would also be tempted to make sweeping generalizations on an entire industry if the sole same was my own experience.

You're clearly trying to be dismissive of someone, but the overly complex sentence structure makes it hard to tell who you are misrepresenting.

Because there is more to life than coding? Family, friendship, health, leisure… Other professionals actively try to separate these from their daily duties, regardless of whether they like their jobs.

My children are being raised by a parent that cares about them and makes time for them. I didn't have that privilege.

There is a difference between "want to" and "have to". You are talking about the former. GP about the latter.

for some people having strict working hours is a baseline to prevent burnout, and generally to have more diverse life where you have time for family, leisure, or even coding your pet project that you don't hate, but it doesn't put any money in your pocket (yet :P)

Some people are dyed-in-the-wool programmers, and doing this is fun for us. It's eustress, not work, like lifting weights. Those other folks watching the clock are doing a job.

You are not describing interest, you are describing obsession.

I love being a software engineer, still, my family is orders or magnitude more important than my employer’s codebase. I really don’t care about my code architecture issues at work when I play Legos with my son or when I ask my wife if she had a good day while cooking together.

And I say that while currently working for a good employer on interesting topics.

> You are not describing interest, you are describing obsession.

I'm describing passion.

> love being a software engineer, still, my family is orders or magnitude more important

It's not mutually exclusive...

I wake up at 6am, usually because that's the time my son wakes up. I spend around 30m with him until my wife takes over.

Then I work on some stuff from 6:30 to 8:30 before the rush of the day starts.

My wife does her morning yoga starting at 8:30 so I take care of my son from 8:30 until the nany arrives at 9am.

I do my work day WFH (with some pauses to play with my son or chat with my wife) until 6pm, then stop to spend time with my son before he goes to bed around 7pm.

I cook, eat and discuss with my wife between 7pm and 9pm.

We usually then head to the sofa where she watches a movie and I sit next to her reading/coding.

She will go to bed around 10pm, I usually continue to work/code/read until 11pm/midnight.

3 times a week I swap the cooking part to go running for an hour. Or I do it at lunch time.

Overall I spend quite some time with my wife and child, while still working between 2 and 6 hours more per day.

I really don't think I have a crazy schedule, nor that I don't spend enough time with my wife or child, or doing sport.

I think the interesting parties to answer that are your wife and kid (in the future). There is subjectivity in what constitutes “enough”.

And there is also quality vs quantity. Each family is obviously different.

As friendly advice, have an open conversation with your wife about that. Speaking from personal experience, I definitely had months where I thought I was balancing my time well enough and my wife disagreed.

Every conversation in this thread where someone implies what is "enough" "passion" or "accomplishment" makes me agree more with unionizing the industry.

It's as though the absence of religion in modern life has left a vacuum of comradery and dogmatism, so they let work fill it.

To counter your final sentence. Europe has an absence of religion and has no such work-life balance issues as America. (Speaking from experience on both sides of the big pond)

I don’t see much wrong with your schedule if it suits you.

Keep in mind that many people are passionate about multiple things and it is ok that they are not coding related. Please, just don’t assume I am not passionate about my job if I spent “only” 8 hours a day on it on average. There are just more things I am passionate about and I have only one life to live.

Because you are building strawman and false dichotomy. And also because people able to take proper rest are more productive in the long term.

> If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it?

I have multiple competing interests and code + tech adjacent skills are the ones that people will pay for. I also didn't pick it: I'm a 2nd generation programmer and it was taught to me as a basic life skill starting as a toddler.

Not everybody gets into a profession for the same reasons or in the same way.

Because I need money to exchange for goods and services in order to live, particularly in order to maintain housing and healthcare.

I would love to be paid to pursue my passions full-time, but that opportunity has not yet arisen. So I split my time accordingly between doing what earns me a living and doing what I actually enjoy in life.