The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it. To believe otherwise is to think management fully understands the work ahead of time. This is not usually the case. To a lesser extent, even the devs might not know. Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly. Some days you can stop early. It's not entirely in the hands of the workers. You won't know until you start.

What matters more is a reliable result done on time and everyone is happy with the effort required to achieve that. That's a complex balance to achieve across the whole team. You need everyone recognizing the long term benefits of a job well done and they need to feel comfortable with their part of it.

Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.

What world does one want to live in? Build it and enjoy. That's where productivity, happiness, and ease come from. There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.

There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.

I personally know several people from amazon, pretty much all of them acknowledged the crazy oncall expectations there. Combine that with the pip culture and visa issues, and your statement above about being "no more stressed than anyone else" is just ridiculous

Expecting people to work at 1AM, romanticizing them as "heroes"... that's not a normal culture. That's not a healthy lifestyle for the employee and can lead to long term health consequences. And it never applies to everyone equally, because why would you call them "heroes" in the first place

It's one thing if management expects it, it's another thing if I as an employee choose to trade 4 daytime hours for 4 nighttime hours because I know I can be more productive at that time. But building that type of management expectation into a work culture is a red flag

Yeah I'm not talking about being "on call". I don't know anything about Amazon other than it's probably full of bad culture. Nowhere I've worked has ever been like that except a handful of emergencies.

I'm talking about working at a relaxed place because everyone actually gets their stuff done 9 to 5. A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two or whenever else motivation strikes to keep it that way.

I'm saying that these little nudges from the team where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work.

I initially thought above comment was about on call because of the "things catch on fire part", I guess not

where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work

This is true except from my experience the miserable people who leave slack for others to pick up aren't normally all that miserable, just not really motivated. At least, they're not miserable until management does something about it

I think it depends. I’ve encountered some people that definitely seen that way. But I also know that during every period of prolonged underperformance in my career (there have been a couple) I have felt awful about it despite having a strong incentive to try to convince myself it’s my fault.

I think a lot of underperformers end up in a hole where they're burnt out to such an extent that they don't have the energy to leave. It takes clarity, introspection, positivity, and extra work to find a new job; those are exactly the things that burnout saps.

Of course, most people are really good at hiding their emotional state, since that's a requirement to fit into a professional workplace. The facade of happiness stays up well after the real thing is gone.

A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two

I feel like in my experience it's actually less about fun and interesting and more about do you feel like the people running the company see you as a compatriot or a cog? I worked at a pretty tiny startup in college where I regularly talked with the CEO and worked directly for one of the VPs. They were great and from start to finish it's been my most positive work experience, since I felt like one of the team. Dare I say it even felt a bit like a family (well, the CEO and VP were a husband-wife team and I was a college kid at the time).

Then I switched to a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets from them that lead to multiple layoffs. The work itself is actually more interesting than what I was doing at the real startup, but the mismanagement has pushed me into a mindset of mostly only giving them what I'm contractually obligated to, with rare exceptions for smaller projects that I feel I can have a greater direct impact on. I would hazard a guess that management in that company is actually a net negative because if it wasn't for all the bad politics there, I'd probably be just as happy to give them extra time because like you say the work is fun and interesting. And I know a couple other guys there who -were- regularly giving extra time until they got repeatedly personally burned by management.

a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets

Honestly, that sounds like typical startup to me.

The real startup I worked at was probably around a dozen people when I joined. You could probably grow some beyond that and still be reasonably agile (that is, the CEO still has a good idea of the day-to-day operations and can move the company to the right market fit), but once you're at a size where irrelevant middle management is capable of existing (probably around the point that you need two layers of management), I'd posit it's not really a startup any more. Although this might fly in the face of the common definition.

It is not about the time on the clock, but who controls that clock. If it is the employee they are happy!

Get the 1am lover to do 9-5 they will be as miserable as the 7-3 guy being woken up a 1am

Pre-Covid, I was a VP Eng at a startup (total eng team of ~40), I had so many "discussions" with the CEO about who was in the office at what time. The team was people from all stages of life and backgrounds. My QA lead got to the office at 6am and left at 3pm to avoid traffic. Another Eng was a single mom, and was in the office from 9:30am to 3:30pm, and then got back online for a bit after 8pm. Etc. Etc.

Time and again, I'd simply reply with metrics to demonstrate how the team was hitting product & roadmap goals while improving quality. One that really made the point was the Github commit heat map, since there were commits ranging from 6am to 1am every day, with occasional outliers.

On the plus side, I felt particularly well prepared for the WFH / hybrid era, since I was already in the habit of looking at results & outcomes (and setting expectations based on these) vs. hours of butts in chairs.

That sounds great. I wish more people in mid- to high-management would see things that way. From my experience, your single mom’s schedule would be great for me.

These varied schedules won't work in every situation. Sometimes, people need to meet (even if virtually) or they need answers to questions and situations where people's schedules aren't kind of synced becomes problematic.

My best hours worked start at 7pm when the world is quieter and my peers arent around to disrupt me.

Plus it feels good that the next time I see someone I have conjured a deliverable.

Meanwhile, if you give me daily 9am meetings I am not functional at any point in the day

This sounds more like a Visa problem though. I think the best stress reliever is when you know you are safe losing your job or walking away by yourself, you have enough money saved that you can spend more than a year doing whatever you want even if you were to lose your job and without having to worry about it influencing your life. Then the motivator to do long hours and work at odd times is passion, desire to climb and feeling of ownership rather than fear of losing your job.

I'd like to know what proportion of the working population is in such a strong financial position that they have a year's worth of (nonretirement) living expenses sitting around.

If we're off in fantasy land, the real best stress reliever is to have enough money to cover your expenses for the rest of your life, so you don't even have to consider trading your time for money in the first place.

Probably not that large proportion, but working in tech if you save 50 percentage of your income you should be able to reach that position within a year.

Yes, but I think being able to generate savings for a lifetime is a much further out goal than just 1 year which in tech is very realistic to save 50 percent.

Friendly reminder that "working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr. Most people "working in tech" aren't in Silicon Valley, and can't easily save 50% of our income per year and still have enough to pay for both food and the mortgage/rent.

"working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr.

You're of course right

can't easily save 50% of our income

Really? Of course people are at different stages in their life (being the sole income earner in a family with 2 kids for example, would easily mean that you cannot save 50% income in lots of locations), but assuming that we're only talking about new grads (for simplicity's sake)...

I believe that in virtually all locations, tech pays well enough that you can save 50% of your income. I know it is in London, and believe the same applies in east Europe and India for example? (But truthfully, I only know of FAANG salary data for India, not sure how salaries are in the rest of the industry)

Amazon is known to be a bad place to work for the exact issues you list. The OP was talking about generally, which I agree with.

This conversation feels very similar to comp conversations where outliers drive the discussion.

this isn't about 'on-call' or 'expectations.' Eg, I'm currently looking at a work problem casually (it's about 11 PM) because I have some time and I'm curious, so I can slack off tomorrow at work. Win win.

"Crazy on-call expectations that require you to be available and potentially working at any hour of the day and night" is something very different than the topic under discussion, and I didn't interpret sublinear's comment at all to be endorsing that viewpoint.

Agreed. It's important to put enough effort that you find meaning in your work, but not so much that it ruins your wellbeing. Here's a rough algorithm that works for me:

1. Estimate the hours you think it will take to complete a task.

2. Double it and let the team know you did that.

3. Do the work well including good documentation.

4. Assess your progress when you've spent 50% of the planned hours. If you're not at least halfway done, avoid overworking. Instead, seek help within the team and descope.

5. Utilise any extra time for learning new and useful skills, if you finish ahead of schedule.

Cheers

I agree. This requires a healthy workplace though.

I worked somewhere, well two places where I was literally taken to task about how long something took. Repeatedly. They didn’t care about why, just that it wont happen again.

It didn’t: in both cases it’s time to fire up Word again and edit my CV (pretty much the one reason I use that program!)

It’s reasonably straightforward to produce a very nice resume/CV in LaTeX.

...and then you find that you have to go back and do another one in Word, for the places that will only accept a .docx as input.

Why isn’t it table stakes to accept PDF? Recruiters have been caught using Word to make false changes in a candidates’ résumé.

Maybe. But that’s like learning to build a car and then building one and fine tuning one because I had to go to an office 200 meters away once in a few years.

Yeah, I did Texin’ in college and tried after that as well. No body gave a shit and now when I look at CVs for hiring purposes I don’t give a shit either. Now my CV is on a live.com free throwaway account — that’s where it resides and gets worked upon and converted to PDF when needed.

If I move away from Doc, it'll be to Markdown most likely, or some kind of paid generator thing.

Form the point of view of a maker / contributor it's common sense that the more tired you are, the worse your output will be. For me, there is a cut off point where the time spent working "tired" or after hours is just not worth the return anymore.

That said, not every work is directly "building" - some aspects of a job might involve collaboration, communication and helping others out when they're stuck. Spending some time after hours to help a colleague who got stuck might have a result which is disproportionately larger to the input that a tired person had.

I'd guess most people have had the experience of working late and beating their head against a problem for hours, leaving it, and solving it in minutes the next morning.

This isn't about opinion. There's increasing hard evidence that limited hours and a four day work week don't just increase employee happiness, they increase productivity and company value.

The question isn't "Why do only some people regularly want to work long hours?" but "Why are long hours considered heroic, when in fact they cause predictable harm to individuals and organisations?"

It's not just IT. Law, medicine, finance, and even big-name architecture all have the same culture of professional hazing where newcomers are expected to give themselves stress-related PTSD before they're allowed to start climbing the ladder.

And the abuse becomes generational because of "It never did me any harm" - when in fact it clearly did.

Maybe it's something like a much milder kind of historical human sacrifice, where the intuition is that greater sacrifice means greater reward. This is useful in some cases such as delayed gratification but is harmful when the sacrifice is seen as directly producing the desired gain.

Generally there's a correlation between sacrifice and and reward- the "no pain no gain" idea goes back fairly far for example. When the intuition taken to it's logical extreme that the greater the ask the greater the sacrifice necessary, which is where you get something like Moloch.

It's interesting you mention the ladder and hazing - one idea is that human sacrifice was more prevalent the stronger the hierarchy, and that sacrifice helped support the hierarchy and priests in a position of authority, which seems to run parallels to what you're describing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-human-sacrifi...

> There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am.

Please don’t call these people “heroes”, and if you’re doing this, please stop. You’re setting expectations that everyone else should also be up at 1am “casually looking at work”, and if they’re not, they’re not a true “hero”.

This is how unhealthy work/life balance starts at companies. People that work after hours for fun is is called workaholism. Meanwhile, the people that are also having fun from 9-5 are suddenly not doing enough, and are no longer having fun.

And of course the “heroes” are not stressed — they’re able to enjoy working long hours, and making their way up the ranks by being a “hero”.

Framing abuse and alienation as heroism is how capitalism extracts value from the most precious resource in our decadent lives: time and energy.

Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.

Framing abuse and alienation as heroism is how capitalism extracts value from the most precious resource in our decadent lives: time and energy.

I think it’s broader than capitalism. It’s a tool of coercion. If you manage to gaslight people and make them feel bad about their performance, then it’s easier to make them do absurd things without resistance. Nothing the stakhanovites would not do and while they were living in a kind of dystopia, it had nothing to do with capitalism.

Within the confines of my insignificant job, I appreciate more the professionalism of a properly work-life balanced management, which should provide more than enough wiggle room for the weird hours people without fetishizing their volunteer work.

Indeed!

There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am.

You’re insane.

There is a difference between being excited about learning this fancy technology thing in your 20ies and having to deal with the same basic shit to afford desirable lifestyle in 30ies.

I have seen this repeated so often, but let me put something clear: If your work constantly requires weird hours when it could realistically be a 9-to-5 job if they just hired enough/the right people or had their marbles together in terms of organization — then the only reason you need to do this is mis-management.

I worked in the film industry where you are sometimes for actual physical reasons (the sun being the sun) required to work weird hours. Excuse my french here, but only idiots wear bad work schedules as a badge of honor. Bonus points for when you confuse the thin bond you form with the other victims of such abuse with friendship. If you constantly need to overschedule people, you did a bad job at resource allocation. If your work load is constantly on the edge and things are always "exciting" for all the wrong reasons, you are managed by incapable fools. In a smooth operation the content of the work is exciting, the schedule and the work hours boring.

You can call yourself a "hero", but it is your life (that all of us only get one of) you're wasting. If you ask me (and you didn't) there is better a good reason each time it is wasted like that.

Don't get me wrong, I am willing to step in to do the extra mile when there is a good reason, but in my experience it is very rare that there truly is. If the content of my work is exciting I can easily go for the whole day, but it would be in the interest of my employer to stop me, so I can do this for months without burnout and fatigue.

Fully agreed.

Especially in IT, most deadlines are arbitrary moments in time, pulled out of someone's ass. If the deadline is so tight that people need to work more hours, either there has to be a very good reason which there very well might be, or someone's shit at making deadlines. Then admit you did poorly at planning, move the deadline, and only then can you start thinking about making your people work overtime.

You only see people going on-call with no stress because everyone else burned out and quit. Very simple selection effect. Declaring that things can never be better and that this is fine prevents us from finding useful and meaningful improvements that will make our teams happier, healthier, more productive, more stable, and more inclusive.

Well, as long as you don't expect others to perform in similar way all is fine.

Since, you know, we have this tiny little thing called actual life we enjoy living, which definitely absolutely 100% doesn't happen in front of screen, any screen. Or you/we have kids. Or need 7-8h of sleep like a normal person does.

Doesn't matter at the end what are the reasons, I know on my proverbial death bed (and all years from right now leading to it) I would regret massively spending more time at work then necessary, since it eats time I can do everything else. Life is awesome if you do some effort to make it so. Not so much without that effort part, then even that screen may look like a good use of time. Also life is much much shorter than youngish folks feel like it is, and the window for great experiences is much smaller.

My own experience is that hours worked are irrelevant. It can vary. Deal with it.

Why? Just work your hours.

Once I grew out of the initial imposter syndrom in my first job, I would never work late for some arbitrary deadline.

There are so many heroes out there casually looking at work while eating cereal in their underwear at 1am. They're no more stressed than anyone else.

Oh please. They are losers getting abused, not heroes. And they wage dump the rest of us.

You can get away with romantizing that for hackers or business owners in the startup phase. That is like 0,5% of us.

Overscheduling and underscheduling happen all the time. Things catch on fire. You have to work accordingly.

You need more predictability than that in most things. Even start ups. The picture you are painting is of a badly organized company that needs to slow down a bit and ... think.

I have worked for that kind of company and the more boring sort. The more boring sort tends to make more profit.

Startups might be different, but it must be intentful chaos - not getting caught up in pointless busywork.

Some days you can stop early.

Rarely. The only companies that allow that are probably the ones that made you do a 24h stint the day before.

It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project

While I understand the sentiment (BTDT and thoroughly enjoyed it!) it is very important to see this as a management failure. If something is vital (or even mildly important) to the success of a project, it must be accounted for in the timeline and properly resourced.

Anything else leads to deathmarch projects where the extra free work after hours becomes more and more expected and required, no longer a fun diversion.

Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow.

It could be argued that code exploration at the pace you need should be part of your regular working hours, if that is what is needed to do your job efficiently. In the extreme, not allowing your employees to do so is failed management.

Of course, the knowledge and efficiency you gain by doing so is not measurable by any quantifiable metric, so it's easy to see how it will be conveniently discarded as unnecessarily.

Even better, by having you convinced that it is something you should do in your own free time, they can reap the benefits without the costs. Full profit.

I'm in the "creative" field (aka, visual time-based arts, so to speak, but honestly, it's "work," and in the same vein, every other job is teeming with much-needed creativity that often doesn't get translated to visual arts, but that's an aside). But this is how I approach my work as well. All that is to say, I really appreciate this post, and it's very validating to whatever I've experienced in the "creative" visual arts field. Which to me kinda points to larger meta patterns that emerge from work in general.

In my humble opinion you have started totally on something that a study/poll like this doesn’t even point to.

You are talking about I/we/people “wanting/loving/preferring” to work at certain hours or for certain length of hours (usually not often or not regularly/daily) compared to being “asked/made/forced/expected” to work that way often/regularly/daily.

There are so many heroes

Heroes? Really? Okay.

Working slowly after hours with no promise of getting much if anything concrete done is a deep joy for some of us. I sometimes need to play with my work to know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's often outside the scope of what I'm being asked to do, yet vital to a successful project instead of a mediocre one full of garbage decisions smoothed over by management lies and stress on the whole team to maintain.

Part of me thinks that it's an open secret that this is the only way anything of real quality gets done. I've been burned by investing too much into pet projects, though.

In my younger days when I worked in an office, my "in-office" time was largely just seat-warming, because it's very difficult for me to actually get much done in the office environments that companies seem to prefer. Instead, I'd actually do my work on my "off hours", when I can be in a productive environment.

As I aged, though, I started wanting to have a life outside of programming, so stopped that practice. Now my employer has to be happy with whatever I can get done during work hours, but I have a much happier life.

Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours

Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers

Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.

To me, it reads like this: “those who log off of Slack are more productive” which matches my experience perfectly. My productivity shoots up as soon as I close Slack.

Depending on your role, communication on Slack could be as much as 50% of your job responsibilities.

Not everyone is a line dev who codes 7 hours after a 10 minute standup.

Not everyone is a line dev who codes 7 hours after a 10 minute standup.

Funny enough, those often answer fastest. The busiest communicaters sometime don't answer for days.

Because of how malicious notifications are by default in Slack (e.g. @here, @channel, bots you can't mute) and how poorly the catch-up flow is (e.g. no "unreads" view on mobile, I'm in 16 different slacks which have to be tabbed into individually), I tend to catch up 1, maybe 2 times a day.

Similar to how when corporate email got pushed into a web view rather than being accessible via a native mail app; the only way I could manage things was to filter into topics, and some topics I only check once a week.

What the previous commenter mentioned is kinda independent on the communication channel if it’s written.

And how does that affect the productivity of those who are trying to reach you?

It forces them to structure their work so they don't need constant realtime questions from teammates generating constant interruptions.

How does it affect the overall long term productivity of the team, I think is the real question.

If it wasn't important enough to warrant a phone call, probably not that much.

I was getting a couple hundred IMs a day and I would say that less than five of them were actually worth an interruption.

You could say the opposite is true as well. How do you know after hours workers are not rating their productivity higher than actual? How do you know that the 9-5 workers aren’t rating their productivity as lower than usual?

All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.

“All data in of itself is useless”…what does that even mean? That’s like saying a chair in of itself is useless because no one is sitting in it. And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless.

Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.

And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless.

Now we are getting somewhere.

I mean I can do mental gymnastics to understand the sentiment, but it really just comes down to individual preferences and definition of "use". To me, the usefulness of everything is in constant flux, and that's kind of cool to think about.

I thought your comment was spot on. I just appreciated the possible turn towards nihilism or existentialism.

We spend so much of our life determining what is useful in one sense of the word, and rarely stop to think about the usefulness of what we do in the philosophical sense.

All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.

The point isn't the size. The point is there are too many confounding factors. It could be that people who work longer hours do so because they are high on trait conscientiousness, which also causes them to report low productivity

It could even be because they are conscientious that they actually work slightly slower, and/or it could be that people who are less conscientious just don't care as mcuh about producing what was expected.

To paraphrase the late Hitch: productivity metrics are not great. Neither is the word "connection" in science-adjacent reporting.

A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.

No it’s not. No sample size can make up for other biases.

It’s the nature of the study that parent comment is referring to.

If a study is self-reporting, it’s an observational study which can only establish correlation, meaning the study can only say, “there might be something here that warrants a further research”.

A clinical trial is needed to establish causation.

So while 10k sample size reduces the error bars, it only increases the confidence that there might be something here worth doing a more rigorous study later.

Isn't this just a variation of "those who feel more productive during the day log off earlier"? Or reversing the statement, "those who feel less productive during the day feel compelled to work longer hours"?

Sure but is it a particularly long bow to draw to say those who feel less productive often are in fact less productive?

Not at all, but then all the survey says is that less productive people make up for it by spending more time. That hardly surprises me -- desk workers usually feel an obligation to complete tasks even on days they aren't running hot.

Those who are in a lower productivity state (stress, sleep quality, etc) are more likely to work after hours?

Those who are under the pump are more likely to be stressed, sleep poorly, AND work longer hours. Zounds!

Welcome to evidence in the soft sciences. I can't really blame them though, the kind of experiments needed to really measure these kinds of things would never past muster with an ethics board.

It is difficult to measure productivity, but what would be unethical about it?

what would be unethical about it?

Introducing Jira to the experiment.

Yeah or if you're the type of person who THINKS you're not productive and therefore that causes you to work more hours.

A lot of this stuff seems obvious and self-evident, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of it was supported by actual research, but you're absolutely right that self-reported data gathered from internet surveys is questionable at best.

Every person has their own definition of what their "productivity" even means, they each have only their own subjective measures of their own productivity, and there's no verification to check who is providing the data, to catch those who simply outright lie or to catch people who click through the survey without even reading/understanding what is asked. Two people could both report 10% higher productivity when in fact there is nothing similar about their productivity levels at all.

Internet polls and surveys are cheap and easy which is why so many people use them, and they can be pretty fun when all you're trying to find out is which celebrities are popular or which harry potter character you are, but they are generally terrible for getting data useful for actual science or for anything where accuracy matters. It's no wonder that there's such a huge reproducibility problem in social sciences considering the heavy reliance on self-reported data through internet surveys.

Before I thought I had ADHD I would sit around the office not doing much of anything in a sort of "ready" state, ready to jump on the next thing someone would try to distract me with or "ready" for the next meeting that is sometimes more than an hour away.

It's only after everyone else went home and I felt relaxed that I finally got any of my actual work done. :(

That sounds like my self-diagnosed ADHD - I have exactly the same thing. What changed your mind about having ADHD?

That scenario speaks to me as well but it seems to be more an issue with modern society than anything else.

Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it?

Isn't this "ADHD" everyone that has a hard time getting things done because we expect constant interruption and we got used to it?

I would have agreed a couple of years ago but since then I have become considerably enlightened about neurodiversity and how differently brains can work.

I would love to learn more about this. My assumptions is that everyone is dealing with this issues but some people are able to push through with motivation/discipline and the right environment.

I'm not convinced that calling "ADHD" anytime we have a hard time doing something is the right way to recognize that we now live in a society that is absolutely full of small dopamine hits.

I would love to learn more about this.

I think that's great. I'd encourage you to go looking for evidence your assumptions are wrong rather than looking for evidence that confirms it. This is a widespread misconception, so you'll find no shortage of think pieces to support your prior if you go looking for them. Evidence that this is in fact a misconception may be harder to come by, but you'll find it.

Something that helped it click for me was a friend walking me through their day step by step. In isolation, the experiences they were describing were struggles I and everyone else experiences to some degree. But seeing them arranged together made it click for me that their experience of life was just different.

I was trying to be comforting to them by telling them something like, "hey, we all feel that way sometimes, but you just pick yourself up by your bootstraps," but that wasn't the right approach because it wasn't a "motivation and discipline" issue. It was like I was giving them advice for troubleshooting Linux while they were on Windows, the machinery of their mind was simply of a different make.

Here's a metaphor that might help. It's pretty uncontroversial that cultures vary widely, and this often causes "culture shock" when visiting someplace foreign. Once I was in the Philippines, and the traffic patterns were illegible to me. It wasn't big cars in neat lanes, it was schools of motorcycles packed together and moving in all directions. I couldn't understand when it was my turn to cross the street and was almost hit several times.

If you accept that premise, is it any wonder that other people's minds would be entirely different places?

Postscript: This isn't too say constant notifications aren't bad for people's mental health, and might not exacerbate people's ADHD. Only to say that neurodiversity is a real phenomenon and that the technology isn't the primary cause.

The Slack chime is a master stroke on this skit. A coworker once told me their mental health improved after they disabled the chime. (They were still responsive to messages, to be clear.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ

maxbonds comments are good.

I was a sceptic about ADHD until I read Adrian Chile's articles about his adult diagnosis [1]. I was then encouraged by those close to me to go and get checked out, and sure enough I was diagnosed (at 52). Then I learnt more about it.

The shock for me was when I filled out the screening questionnaire and mentioned to the psychologist when handing it over that "this is a waste of time, everyone would answer all these questions the same way". She gently disabused me of that notion and it turns out my answers were very different to the mean. As I became aware that most other people experienced the world very differently to me, it rocked my world.

I find the label ADHD unhelpful, personally - as you seem to. It has gone from being a pejorative label for energetic kids, to being shorthand for "I can't concentrate at the moment, give me a break", to being a middle-class lever to help your child get extra time on exams. I can't fathom this one - at school I would either finish my exam in half the time allocated, or you could give me 10 hours and it wouldn't help. What good is 30 extra minutes?

Anyway, the diagnosis has been great in helping me understand myself and others. ADHD is simply the current label for a chunk of the bell curve. There is much variation within this chunk. Neurotypicals are the big bit in the middle of the curve. I am sure that over time the definitions will become more specific and nuanced.

I don't suffer from depression anymore, seems it was simply a side effect from struggling with ADHD and "why am I incompatible with normal life".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/30/my-treatment...

(and he has written many more since).

What most IT people think of as “real work” is being able to concentrate on a problem and work towards solving it. This is a creative type of work, and requires a quiet mind that can focus. When you’re in fire-fighting mode, the fight/flight/freeze survival hormones are active, which suppresses creativity (it’s not smart to be thinking about your next cave painting when there’s a lion stalking you).

Being in one or the other mode is normal, and not related to ADHD.

Can we not do this? Being in a "ready mode" because you have a meeting in an hour is a common experience among those with ADHD. It's totally unrelated to a "fight or fight" response.

When someone relates an experience you don't understand, it's a natural reaction to assume it's actually a different experience that you do understand. I know because I catch myself doing this all the time, too. But let's understand that we have that cognitive bias and resist the temptation to "well, actually" people. (One technique that's helpful to me is to rephrase my comment as a question instead of a correction.)

As for different types of work, meetings are important and are work, but it still is frustrating when they make it difficult to get your other work done. That's not about whether certain kinds of work are legitimate. If you're late on something and you tell your manager that you had too many meetings and couldn't get into a productive flow on those tasks - that will not be seen as a legitimate reason not to have completed your assigned tasks. (Similarly, having your flow interrupted will not be seen as a legitimate reason to have fewer meetings. I've had a manager deny my request to skip a meeting - while I was fighting a production incident preventing a "must win" customer from using the product. This was something the CEO had directly told us was priority 0.) Thus, you end up working more hours, and you can't dedicate as much time to other parts of your life, like family and self care. Which can lead to burnout.

Same for me. I struggle to get much done during the day. Way too many distractions. I become quite productive around 4pm and onwards. And yes, I have been officially diagnosed with ADHD. I sometimes do take low-dose meds. And they appear to help.

How do they control for the fact that people who are falling behind frequently work more after hours?

Is it that after hours works causes loss of productivity or is that slow people work after hours to try to make up for falling behind?

100% I feel like a lot of the time after hours work is driving by lack of productivity / prioritization / understanding “good enough”

I smile out of respect on calls when a subject matter lead says

a. they've gotten as far as they can given incomplete inputs/scope

b. and they're not going to prioritize further meetings until the lead provides what they need

Not being a "team player" in a fuzzy sense is actually "helping the team" prioritize efficiently!

You can't be a team player while being in 1-man team, and everybody else doing their own stuff not related to your goals. That's not much of a team work.

people who are falling behind frequently work more after hours?

From my experience it's the opposite, the people who are falling behind aren't the ones working irregular hours

I think there's a vicious cycle of correlation.

People like that tend to work in the wrong ways and always make up for it in extra time and stress. If they said "no more extra time" they might be more willing to change the bad habits that lead them to be unproductive.

I've seen it a lot. People become so used to their zombie state they waste hours without really thinking and if they just stopped and analyzed the situation, they'd approach things in a much better way or troubleshoot rather fast.

Obviously, it's all mixed with career incentives and so many other factors, but I'm a big proponent on having people work on their contractual quantity of hours and not more (except on a rare occasion which ahould not happen often, like 1-3 times in a year).

How do they control for…

They don’t. It’s an observational, self-reporting study, which can only establish correlation, and not causation.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the marketers who wrote this have probably heard of a control variable at some point in their life.

They do mention it in passing, but there is no way to statistically control for that without a randomised controlled trial (or Mendelian Randomisation).

There is no reason to think that working outside hours is the cause of the problem. It could be a consequence of an individual struggling outside of work that then leads to having to try to catch up.

There is no way that climbing the stairs to the 10th floor will be as fast as climbing to the 1st or 8th floor, let alone the 10th floor. The same applies to working hours. There's no way you'll be as productive in the 10th hour as you were in your first hour.

Brains aren’t like quadriceps. I get more productive as I work longer and build momentum. More and more concepts are loaded in memory, so to speak.

To me, it’s more like speeding up until I hit the wall on the tenth floor.

I’m of two minds on this a. It depends if we are building or thinking - building definitely benefits from more time, and feel like I get momentum (as you described), implementing something over 12+hr sprint is hugely productive for me. On the other hand if I have a problem to solve I’m completely unproductive trying to do it at 3am.

sure but cache warming works on the order of 30 minutes

I don't fully get the analogy. 10th floor is higher than 1st or 8th, so then you would get more work done? You can certainly climb 10 floors with the same speed as 1 or 8..

Replace 10 with the highest floor your muscles can go to before they are exhausted

For those that only read the headline, this is an important caveat:

"On the flip side, employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."

I wonder if that means pursuing work-related personal ambitions (i.e. promotion), or outside-work personal ambitions (i.e. side projects)? Could side projects actually reduce burnout?

Yes. If you want to pursue them, but not if you add a side project just to battle your burnout.

A core part of burnout is lack of control, and a side project can give you that feeling back - if you do it for the joy of it.

I personally do this a great deal. So many things that are not coding in life (from visiting museums to getting lunch with a friend to going to a government office to getting medical tests done) are far easier during normal work hours.

Coding can be done at midnight, when none of those things can be done.

I'm pretty much retired but I have zero sense of holidays. I always worked much more efficiently when everyone left the office, and 3 or 4 day weekends were always pure heaven. (I liked my work though.)

I read this as "who prefers to work non-standard workday" e.g. 11-7 which I used to do to avoid traffic. I really enjoyed it and the slower morning was really helpful for me. early morning stand-ups post-pandemic really killed my morning happiness.

For me, I'm most productive after hours because during the day, I get too many pings and escalations. After hours is the only time I can focus and get deep work done myself. This is something I'd really like to improve, but I'm really not sure how. I've tried creating discussion groups and many other approaches to make knowledge transfer more efficient. However, the real issue is company growth. A huge recent period of growth has meant a focus on training people. This is only the kind of thing I could defend against if I were 1-2 ranks higher in the company, and honestly, this lack of longterm growth planning is one of the reasons I would leave my company.

One approach I've been thinking of experimenting with is saving everything I say, and using an LLM with my custom knowledge base to answer a question. I actually think a borg-like communication structure in a company could be really efficient. If every communication was publicly available, and we used ML to make that information consistent and to answer queries, I think you could achieve coherence with a company much faster, move as a unit much faster, and get a lot more done.

However, it's still a pipe dream at this point due to the context length limits. The actual amount of important context at a company is many times what a model can keep in mind now. As models get bigger, or if a group can run multiple models many times to make the company info widely consistent, it would be much better.

For instance imagine now, 30 people at your company work on one project, and 50 people work on another. They might take a slightly different definition for a term, and do work which is ultimately counterproductive to each other. Usually, it takes a conflict arising to resolve this, and people are long stuck with the mutually-incorrect definition. If an ML algorithm can look at everything both groups are saying and point out inefficiencies, I think you could get more cohesion, especially before problems get big enough to be a drain.

That being said, this type of system is more of a pipe dream, and I don't think it will be feasible for a few more years. In the meantime, I'm struggling how to balance communication with work. Advice appreciated.

I ran into this problem after a promotion and some company growth left me over a much larger footprint of our engineering department than I was used to. I ended up making a couple rules for myself and establishing a couple new routines, which all have helped:

“Handbooking” - this is something I learned from reading about Gitlab and ended up adopting for my department. If it’s important, it goes into the handbook. If it’s not, then I probably don’t need to know it anyway. This alone took a lot of burden off me (people only ping me now if something is missing from the handbook or if they didn’t understand it, both of which are signals that the handbook needs work).

Office hours - I don’t do this consistently, but when I feel like the interruptions are still too frequent I’ll just post some office ours in our dev channel and tell people they can bother me in a few 2-hour blocks that week. Otherwise I sit there and livestream whatever work it is that I’m doing for whomever is interested in that sort of thing.

Trusting - I found much of my increased stress was a lack of faith in others to do a passable job of things, so I’d burden myself with them. In a lot of cases things went as badly as I expected by letting go, but my personal stress was reduced nonetheless.

Thanks for the tips. I tried live streaming work a few times. I think it can work as long as people don't ask questions too much, but I feel a bit too egotistical to do it. It doesn't feel great.

Yeah, I feel that. Usually I have like a 2 hour coding block planned with something new/interesting, so it would end up being more of a workshop, like e.g. here’s how to build a really quick cron job for our k8s cluster or whatever. I tend to keep an eye out for little ~2 hour tasks that would be interesting and just save them for those blocks.

Aside from that, ego is a lot more about attitude than action. If you remain inquisitive/curious/accepting/etc. then you won’t be seen as cocky.

Also, just a reminder if you’re in an advanced position then showing off your coding skills is less about ego and more about helping. I had a boss early on point out to me (much to my surprise) that the programmers sitting around me were drowning trying to put together even simple solutions to their problems, and I had the ability to save them hours with just a few minutes of attention. Obviously you can only take that so far, but it gave me a lot of confidence to know I could help folks out.

Yes, there's this amazing thing called "documentation".

Confluence works well if you KISS - write just what the audience needs to know, in terms they can read & find.

Avoid writing grand tracts of wanna-be architecture, policy, theory or planning; just write useful actionable material on topics your audience needs. You will find this works.

Source: I led 400 devs and this was the only way that could scale.

http://literatejava.com/documentation/how-to-write-good-wiki...

“Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours.”

Maybe people who are less productive end up having to work more hours.

I agree, I think it's mixing up cause and effect.

Especially how it is phrased with "feel obligated", it's clear these are people who are conscientious about their productivity and most likely set a higher bar for their output. It's hard to think their out of hours work is causing their loss of productivity, rather their work environment is causing it and only the people who feel bad about it (ie: would report that their productivity wasn't adequate) actually work longer hours to compensate.

This reminds of the Dilbert about marriage + happiness:

https://nonconformist1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dilbert_r...

I think that the clear result here is:

Workers who feel they're less productive work more. Which makes perfect sense. Workers who feel they're less productive may be more likely to try to compensate or worried that they will be fired.

Or equally. Maybe people who are well organised are more productive. Which, personally, I think is self evident.

47 here. And 20 years of dev experience. I am now hired by a big company. As far as I understand, it is to become a “manager” (==a politician). So now I spend my days having pointless meetings with bozos.

Because of the poor management, we have had reorganizations and budget cuts all along the year. Making proper work impossible.

So now, I simply code what we need, after hours. This is exhausting, as it is double days. But extremely valuable in the end.

It's good that you have ownership of the problem, but make sure you get something out of it. If someone else will get credit for your hard work, you will experience explosive demotivation.

That happened today, as our demo was successful and the team collectively reached a level of applied theory that is matching the expectations of our stakeholders.

Truth is that the addition of the word “applied” to that last sentence is 100% my effort.

But my point of view is that everybody will get benefit from that effort, and we can now make everyone understand that the theory that my team has been pushing for months is really good.

No one of the team could have achieved that [because of their poor understanding of those pesky “implantation details”]. So i just did it.

I saw a sign in a cubicle farm one time: "In every group, someone's the weakest. If you don't know who that is, it's you." Fuck that.

The person who put up that sign is desperate for reassurance.

I have been there. I was working long hours because work was exciting. And also I wanted to show my boss that I put in a lot of effort. I voluntarily spent a lot of time in the office to finish tasks more early than expected. Sometimes this extra time was completely unproductive and the things I did turned out to be irrelevant a few days later. Sometimes it was very important for the business that things got finished and the extra time was therefor productive. I learned for myself, that I cannot sustain working long hours regularly without loosing interest in the job.

Right now my mantra is: Keep showing up.

For me this means get work done on a regular basis. My focus is to work on this topic for years without loosing interest, instead of prioritizing to finish the current workload as fast as possible.

Real productivity is achieved when you are an expert in the domain and you have built a network in the company or market segment. Expertise and personal network are the main levers to get thins done.

I noticed this as well. When I was freelancing I would sometimes get inspired and motivated and work til 10pm or later, not because of a deadline but because I felt like it.

Each time, I noticed the next day was rather slow. I was more tired and less inspired.

Forcing myself to stop after 6pm worked wonders, I would wake up the next day easily, my brain overflowing with new ideas. On top of that I'd manage to sustain that motivation for several days or even weeks in a row.

How is that still surprising?

Because far too many people still think that more hours worked directly and linearly translates to more productivity, with no upper bound.

High performers don't need to put in extra hours, in other words. Big surprise.

I don't think this is a reflection on performance. seems like the key word here is "obligated" to work after hours. this is due to managers pushing deadlines on their reports. honestly this isn't much of a surprise. If your boss is obligating you to work after hours you are unhappy. one issue here asking engineers to work after hours in a 'you build it you own it' culture. in my mind this qualifies for being "obligated" to work outside of business hours.

A more interesting item in the slide deck is that anyone that has more than 2 hours of meetings in a day has a loss of focus. I think it's conceivable to say that a heavy meeting culture may also force people to be "obligated" to work after hours because they have lost focus time in the day.

The 8 hour work day: created for physical laborers, extended to paper-pushers, and forced onto creative workers along with productivity-sapping random meetings.

The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient. The theory that a business will naturally optimize for efficiency does not survive a meeting with human culture, which has nothing at all to do with organizational efficiency, and everything to do with repetition, imitation, resistance to change, and the easiest short-term path. If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home.

The current white collar worker paradigm is proof that capitalism is inherently inefficient

Of course it's inefficient. If you don't have a dictator saying what to do, then people deciding between themselves to try stuff won't always get it right. But it seems to work better than everything else in the long term.

If you want to get more productivity out of a human, you need to do more than just tell them what time to arrive and go home.

No one just does this, and lots of companies don't even do it. Working times are mostly so that there are work overlap times so people can communicate and not be blocked on things.

Dupe from yesterday (128 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

Anyone have a link to the wordings of the original questions asked?

My strategy:

* Work for a small company

* Show up at 10am

* Leave at 4pm

If I'm really into what I'm doing I'll happily do some work after hours, or on the weekend. No one ever expects it and honestly I try to keep the fact that I'm doing it a secret (don't push commits, just keep changes local).

working less is good > blog by “Slack”

True or false, the jokes write themselves sometimes

Seldom has the "surprised Pikachu" emoticon been more appropriate.

Wow, slaves perform worse when tired! What a discovery... Fck any employer with required "off hours" and wage formulas for compensation. Actually ... fck off hours.

We all know that working your ass off is the way to get things done. The problem is, in most companies, no one can tell the difference between hard working people and folks who take it easy. If a project takes 6 months it must have been hard if it takes 6 weeks on the other hand it must have been easy. No one is going to run the experiment twice.

Seems this is very cultural, eg in Japan there is an expectation that you must always work back late, so people don't give 100% for 8 hrs as they know regardless of performance they will need to put in more hours of overtime.

The key point here is feeling obligated to work outside regular hours. My most productive time is early in the morning or late at night. There’s just less happening at that time, both professionally and personally. There are fewer interruptions and less need to context switch, making it easier to focus and get things done.

Knowing that I’m more creative and productive outside normal business hours, I try to take brakes during the day because I know I’ll make up the time later. I’d much rather get out of the house and take an hour walk when the sun is up and work at night.

The subtitle of this piece:

Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction

The base assumption of the employer structuring and managing the employee's well-being and satisfaction feels so 19th century. I know it's still the prevalent paradigm in HR in most places, but it's crazy how hard that idea persists.

Those who feel on top of their work don't feel they have to catch up on work after hours?

Where is the surprise?

Less is more work posts are so trendy now. The comments invariably point out unexplored confounding variables and the posts lack sufficient substance to be interesting. At the end of the day you can reason that hours != productivity, which everyone knows by now

Have they considered how Slack contributes to decreased productivity?

Employees who feel obligated to work after-hours register 20% lower productivity scores

Very notably, this excludes people who want to work after-hours. A rare person but they do exist in some fields.

Big discussion from a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

"surprising"? It's very well known and nowadays well proven by neuroscience.

Posted yesterday:[0] (190pts, 128 comments). Slack either changed the URL (fooling the dupe detector?), or mods made yesterday's title much less clickbaity.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579890

What is this "productivity score"? Did they just ask people if they feel productive and call that a "score"?

I couldn't find that info in the article.

People who feel obligated to work after work hours also are probably in a poor work culture company.

I log off when I went to log off and if I have an idea or a reason to work at night I do it. If I feel it's not productive I sleep early and do it in the morning.

Those who feel obligated could also be doing it to look good to their boss.

Two factors:

Scrum and its idiotic sprints, especially two weeks sprints. Sometimes things are more complicated than what they seemed, and maybe they just need a couple more days. In the overall scheme of things, no big deal, yeah, from time to time, things take more time than expected, the world is not going to end because of one or two days in 99% of the circumstances. Sometimes you win, sometimes lose and all that jazz. But, then the sprint is over tomorrow, a one day delay becomes a two week delay, demoralization and demotivation ensue, trust is fucked, and it is all downhill from that point.

Second point, closely related to this one, is the strange idea that some managers have that any delay can be solved by the copious administration of more overhead. Let's schedule more meetings! Let's micromanage more! Of course, the developers are slacking! Beatings to rescue. And this is related to the first one, because this kind of manager is usually a True Believer in Scrum.

Over time, developers, like any other animal, is mentally geared towards avoiding pain. Shortcuts will be taken, and one of the most obvious is overtime. And at first it works, overtime actually works a lot of time, until it is chronical.

Interesting. I found I wrote more, and better code once everyone left me alone.

The only people surprised would be the “MBA class” of management. Anyone who has ever worked any job would gladly tell you how productivity decreases if you work after hours. It’s not a revolutionary idea.

Is that really surprising to anyone?

"employees who work outside of standard hours by choice, to better suit their schedule or to pursue personal ambitions, report no negative impacts and even a slight uptick in their wellness and productivity scores."

So, if, like alot of Hacker News readers, you're hacking away on your next startup idea after hours, you should be fine.

Surprising huh?

If the wording and subjects presented in the "article" sound a bit like Bill Lumbergh with a polo shirt was the author, don't forget Slack is Salesforce now.

I have alot of colleagues that avoid their actual work by taking on pet projects or some cross functional nonsense. I have a colleague that takes calls with vendors almost weekly, knowing there's no budget for it. Someone who spends hours with HR or recruiting on some DEI stuff. Someone who wants to be a professional conference speaker. Almost anything to avoid coding. Meanwhile, those of us that simply log on to do work have to pick up their slack. Management doesn't care. I understand this isn't the case everywhere but happiness equates to doing less for some. I don't engage in those projects and I'm very productive.

This is a pretty fraught area. As the comments show, there's a lot of emotion, and cultural differences at play.

"Cultural differences" can be macro, like, in Japan, a 10-12-hour workday is de rigueur, and it can be "micro," like individuals that have different clocks.

I had an employee, who is, no exaggeration, one of the best engineers I've ever known. But he couldn't come in early, to save his life. He'd roll in, around noon, but would often stay until 2AM.

The Japanese loved him. He was often on their time zone.

American HR hated it, and I got called on the carpet, numerous times, as his manager.

But I stood up for him, and let him do his odd hours, even though it cost me. Fortunately, Japan backed me, and they were the ones in charge (that didn't win me any friends on this side of the pond).

I have been "retired" for the last six years. In that time, I have worked harder -and far more productively- than I ever did, in the workforce.

The key seems to be, as has been alluded in the comments, mastery of my own schedule.

Simplest explanation: the lowest performing employees feel the need to work after hours to keep up. Few people start out working more hours than necessary.