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A comment on eu/acc. Parent comment

Re:eu/acc by dns_snek on Monday May 13, 2024 @08:19AM (#40342465)
I agree it's possible to work 10+ hours on occasion. I quickly looked up German laws regarding working hours, and it seems like the legal weekly maximum is 60h (6x 10h per day) which should cover very occasional crunch time to meet deadlines (that's 50% more than the average work week), but long-term average over 6 months must not exceed 48h/week, which seems sensible.

> To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.

I understand, though I don't believe that working long hours is a productive use of anyone's time over time periods longer than a few weeks. From my personal experience working longer than ~8h impacts both concentration and quality, which decimate efficiency of any subsequent hours worked (more bugs then mean more time needed to fix these bugs, which just adds to the crunch).

After a while these side-effects begin to bleed into the next workday which ultimately nullifies the benefits of longer hours.

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Re:eu/acc by constantcrying on Monday May 13, 2024 @09:25AM (#40343093)
I don't know what you are arguing. Do you believe that there will never be a situation where in a startup employers can spend more than 10+ hours of productive work in a day?

I don't know why you are talking as if I didn't completely agree, and already said so, that demand 8+ hours of high quality mental work is counterproductive over long periods of time.

My point remains that German labor laws make startups very hard to do. Not that I believe that you should work 10 hours a day over months, but in a startup there might very well be a situation where you can spend 12 hours effectively, which would be a violation of labor laws.

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