Stretching 2 hours of work into an 8-9 hour day through meetings and sneaky Reddit/hn usage is certainly bad for our brains. But this is the norm as long as managers interpret productivity as butts in seats.
As much as I agree with that I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today.
It's almost as if everybody wakes up, reads Dilbert every morning thinking "Wow, that PHB guy certainly is a role model to aspire to."
It's not as if these patterns can't be changed:
The required technology has been available for more than a decade now.
There are tried and tested approaches for organizing work in a more productive and healthy manner than 9-5.
Still, it isn't happening at a larger scale. While the reasons might simply be risk-aversion or - on a more sinister note - a somewhat implicit understanding that our society is built around a 40 hr work week and we'd face serious upheaval if that was no longer a given, I find those reasons to be tenuous at best in the long run.
As much as I agree with that I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today.
Because managers up a level have no other way of knowing if you're being productive or not. So they look and see if people are ferociously typing. This is not a joke.
Yes, a place where I used to work once sent out a memo trying to encourage more regular work hours because management couldn't find people, and the office always looked half empty. The thing is, it was the operations staff for a astronomical observatory. The "missing" people were generally traveling and/or working at night!
I used to work in research physics and recall hearing a similar story, probably embellished with each retelling. The version I heard had the staff complying with the order and working 9-5, then management complains that no observations are being made at night.
Well, in this case, I personally received the memo. Knowing my co-workers, however, I highly doubt anyone actually changed their behaviour due to it. Other, similar, management antics included scheduling meetings first thing in the morning and complaining that the telescope operators never showed up.
The value they add is easily measurable, but it's still quite difficult to tell whether their performance is due to individual merit or external factors.
For example, in any given year some traders are wildly successful (and reap huge bonuses) but year to year their performance is variable enough to be noise - it's not clear that really good traders really exist. Some are just bound to get lucky.
Similarly sales guys may appear great because their product sells itself, or terrible because of a downturn in the business cycle or sector.
It's not insane to want a read on "how hard are you working" or "how skilled are you" that is independent of all the messy confounding variables of the market.
Because those of us who believe otherwise usually get beaten out and decide to not run businesses any more.
My confounder doesn't like hiring, likes to have a huge pile of cash in the bank to no particular end, and sends people shitty emails if they're late in the morning.
He's successfully killed off enthusiasm and passion for getting things done (mine included), and now people are either making time or leaving.
We got crazy amounts done back when I wasn't cto and was still allowed to lead the tech team - because we'd work from 1pm until the early hours, myopically working on stuff because it was fun to create. That got slowly but surely strangled by timekeeping, requiring people to be in for 0900 (even if they were up half the night working support), and requiring that people only work from the office.
It's impossible to push back against without continuous effort, and eventually one throws the towel in.
Conservatism is easy as it requires you to just maintain the status quo, hence it is the norm in business - whereas change requires effort. It then turns into an endurance race, which can only go one way.
Edit: I don't know why I bother commenting here any more.
Wow, I've worked with "that guy" before as well. Like you said, it's a retreat to the status quo, and conservatism is a common response to feeling overwhelmed or like an imposter.
I now recognize it as a very accurate warning sign, this person has moved from trying whatever they can to help the business succeed to trying whatever they can to cover their ass and put on the appearance that they did all they could.
In our case it's more like newtonian mechanics - for every force there is an equal and opposing force. I've always pushed for growth, for hiring, for bigger clients, for new avenues, for risk - and he has always challenged and pushed for the status quo, and to not spend, not invest, not grow, make sure every month is profitable.
When we were small, my view was dominant, as I worked within and with the team, and we didn't have inertia to overcome, and his conservatism was useful as he talked me out of some risks that in hindsight were crazy. It was a good balance.
Now that we've grown rather a bit, his voice is dominant, as we now have a large team who (as a majority, not all) likewise don't want change or risk or growth, and I've been slowly moved diagonally into a vestigial cto role where I have no direct involvement with the tech team, and instead just deal with escalations, internal and external, technical and non-technical. Chief Tortured Officer.
So - the business will stagnate, then die, and I'm helpless to do anything about it.
The sad thing is he thinks this is success. I feel like we've fundamentally failed.
For added laughs, I feel trapped, as if I leave, I abandon my staff who I love to his mercurial whims, and my agreement is structured such that I would have to sell my equity (not options) (fmv in millions) for £60.
So I'll be saluting from the bridge as we go down, like an idiot.
Time to sell and leave. And if that is really the equity structure, make sure you re-negotiate that with the board before talking about leaving, as part of being a C officer.
Can't sell except for the aforementioned £60. Not £60k, £60 - the nominal value of the shares. The only way I can leave and keep my equity is if I die. If I attempt to have that conversation in a board meeting they'll know what's up and will probably fire me - in which case no severance, not even the £60. There's a third party hnw investor who came in a few years ago who's gone from arms length to "where the fuck are you?!", and he sees me as a troublemaker as I do all the talking in board meetings (cofounder is taciturn), and set goals for hiring and growth that never happen as they're strangled in the crib. By staying silent he's kept himself pristine.
So, tough decisions ahead. Do I write off a decade of my life and enter a tough job market with no savings to tide me over (nothing like having your entire value in equity, and a paltry salary (£30k - pay ourselves less than staff, don't do dividends, keep value in company - see above pointless pile of cash)), or do I continue, which will probably see me lose what little sanity I have left.
Of course, there is an option as mentioned which keeps my family financially secure, but despite everything I don't particularly want to kill myself. It feels like a cop-out.
oh, don't worry. you won't have to make any tough decisions. if you don't have vested equity that you keep when you leave, they're just going to fire you as soon as some real money shows up.
Point remains that terms of yor departure are largely controlled by the firm, not you. Including making conditions so untenable your only rational option is to leave.
Again, a solicitor should be able to give you more specific advice.
Thought about this some more. Reading between the lines a bit, so certainly, correct me if I get this wrong.
But it looks like this: your investors are a bigger problem than your partner. First they write this deal where you don't really own your equity, then they don't let you pay yourselves like owners. Seems to me you're really getting screwed. Seriously: what are you getting out of this job besides experience?
I'm afraid you're in the position of a wolf caught in a trap: you're going to have to chew your own leg off to get out. It'll hurt like all hell, but if you don't do it, you'll die.
In fact, the more I think about this, the more fucked-up it seems. The investors have given you the illusion of owning part of this company, but it's a mirage. You have no way to benefit from that equity. You have no authority, you control no budget, you're paid a pittance, and the only way you can monetize your ostensible share of the company is by dying!
You've been taken, and it doesn't sound like there's anything you can do about it (IANAL; maybe you should consult one, but I'm not optimistic they can do anything for you).
As I said: time to chew your leg off and get free.
> he sees me as a troublemaker as I do all the talking in board meetings (cofounder is taciturn)
Okay, you need to figure out who are your allies on your board. Which of the board members espouse the more aggressive profile that you wish to have? You need to approach them privately to discuss how to move the needle. Board meetings are where decisions are rubber-stamped; the real talking happens before the meeting, in one on one conversations.
I mean at this point, you've got nothing to lose, right?
Just the three of us. Those decisions are rubber stamped in boards - I put forth plans for growth, the investor director negotiates and approves, and then I fail to deliver - I see this as my own failing, despite the reason being things like cofounder dismissing a newly hired hiring manager while I'm on holiday because "we don't need to hire".
That said if I sit in a board and point the finger, I'm the ass, not him - and it is after all me that has failed to deliver on my self-imposed initiatives, regardless of what I think the reason is. It can be argued that one can always try harder, but my will has been attrited by this over the years.
In my experience, what does a manager do if there's no one around to manage?
And how do employees get recognized for their contributions if there are no managers to track it?
It's a catch-22. My thought is that if companies simply paid people as much as they could, all of this would go away. You wouldn't even _need_ managers anymore. One of managers' more important roles, liaising between departments, could become their full time job, which would be better for everyone too (less overhead with employee reviews and bullshit like that).
How does this work? Rather than a company asking an employee what their salary range is, the employee asks the company what is the most they can afford to pay you, and they pay you that.
Forgetting the other most important role, coaching people on the team. And yet another one, shelter from outside unrest. Oh, and blame-absorber. And coordinating efforts, when yet again three engineers in three different places work on the same issue.
You know, this is starting to resemble the "what have the romans ever done for us" skit :)
I'm not disagreeing that many managers don't do this. Or that they do it badly. But managers, when they work properly, do a lot more than liaising.
That's the thing, though. Almost no one does their job "properly". They do it well enough to not get fired - thus management is usually inept and useless. So is it the managers fault when they are just fulfilling the norm or is it the job all together? I would suggest management as a position is at fault rather than the people who occupy that space and do the minimum to get by.
Coaching happens naturally within a well-functioning team.
Sheltering a lot of times means that the team is not aware of key information they should be aware of.
Coordination can be accomplished via proper use of communication tools.
Managers have the power to insert themselves at the critical junctions of natural process flows in order to artificially increase their own importance.
The funny thing is, if you do all those things, but you don't "liaise", then it's very likely that your job-title isn't "manager", but rather "administrative assistant." Sadly, I've never heard of a team of engineers having a dedicated admin assistant.
A lot of corporate malaise could be solved, I think, by
1. giving each team the budget to hire their own admin assistant to coordinate and coach for them (but to leave the liase-ing to the team lead), and then
2. firing all the middle-management layers that now serve literally no purpose.
In my experience, what does a manager do if there's no one around to manage?
Deal with weird interpersonal issues of members on the team. Seriously, if you've never been a manager before, it will shock you some of the childish things people complain to you about.
I do agree with you that the ideal is to have the team be self-managing, but there is usually some maturing that needs to happen among the team to reach that goal.
> How does this work? Rather than a company asking an employee what their salary range is, the employee asks the company what is the most they can afford to pay you, and they pay you that.
I still don't see how that works. Your comment seems like it boils down to saying the company should pay the employee more than they're worth (i.e. worth to the business compared to others who could add the same value), but the company has all sorts of obligations to investors, other employees, etc. and spending money just because they can afford to do so today seems like an irresponsible way to run a business.
Sure, but it's just as irresponsible (economically irrational) as an individual to go the other way.
Really, the "optimal" salary negotiation is for both the employer and the potential hire to first agree on a dollar-value of how much money the employee is expected to make the company—literally, what the hire is worth—and then, having come to agreement over that, to then negotiate what profit margin the company wants to keep of that created value.
You might recognize this as the process a hiring agency goes through to negotiate with an employer. In this case, the employee is their own hiring agency, and the one who will end up with the majority "cut."
Keep commenting. Ignore the bullshit downvotes. I understand weariness when arguing with someone who is hardheaded. They can even be nice, but so stubborn that you are drained by the end of the debate.
Can you name a few companies where this is practiced? Maybe if we all start going to those places (I would happily take less pay for a healthier/happier work life) then maybe our managers would start following them
> I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today.
Most jobs aren't 'creative at any time of the day by oneself' jobs. Support staff can't just clock in at 1pm, because that's when they feel most supportive. Government clerks can't just start and stop when they like, because the counter has to be staffed during office hours. Most office jobs need to have considerable overlap with the times of other people in the office.
Even for programmers, remote work and your own hours is not a clear win. Some people adore it and work well with it, but other people don't do so well in managing their own time. I've worked with people who work remote, make a pretense of busywork, and get little of substance done - but when they were in the office, they got more work done.
Penny-pinching time ("be here at 0900 exactly!"^) is silly, but at the same time, this meme that bosses are automatically bad if they want in-office work and general office hours... it is way too simplistic.
^ funny how those penny-pinchers never demand that you leave on time as well...
The managers are also looking for the easiest way through the day. Hence, butts in seat managing. Actually reviewing long term contribution and giving constructive (or even bad) news is hard work.
Looking for butts in seats leaves more time for fantasy sports, or whatever.
Working from home is unique - many people find lines getting blurred. The bigger difference is in what your downtime is like. Working from home, you can eat or listen to music or go out of the house to the doctor's office. Take a shower, lounge about, talk to the kids or wife or friends or simply goof off.
In the office, you still have to be in the office and looking like you are being productive. Maybe you have to be available for the sporadic work or customer, and you still have to make peace with the annoying coworker. Some places, non-job internet use (even through your phone) is prohibited, so you are sneaking about doing it, always trying to be aware.The whole point is that your time isn't really yours. You are stuck. There. Waiting and passing the time.
Pretending to work often ends up as long term low level stress which is surprisingly bad for you.
Stress is there to deal with physical lions; think long term sacrifice for short term survival not superpowers. The extreme version might be combat, but hyper awareness around threats can apply for much longer periods. Sure, a few hours a week is no big deal, but that's not 4-10 hours a day for decades.
You're describing some things you don't like about being at work, but how do we know which of all these things are actually detrimental to brain function?
Why is programming, being in a meeting, making peace with the annoying coworker or having to be sneaky about reading HN more damaging to our brains than playing a shooter game at home for five hours, having a heated debate with a friend, bingeing on some TV show or contributing to an open source project in your spare time?
Maybe the only thing that really matters is whether we are forced to keep doing something once we get tired of it and would rather do something else.
Maybe all this study reveals is for how many hours the average worker likes doing what they are forced to do at work. That wouldn't tell us very about what work does to the brain function of someone who is exceptionally motivated and loves to keep doing what they do for 16 hours per day.
I don't necessarily mind all of that, save the sneaking around with tech when it seems a bit harsh.
We don't know which things are actually detrimental to brain function. If I were to speculate, I'm going to guess the differences lie in some combination of low-level stress and the actual effort involved.
The effort bit might explain more of the differences. Some folks have better genetics for long-distance running and can do so for much of their lives while others develop issues from overuse and/or become more prone to injuries. I'm hoping we sort some of this stuff out in the future as we get better ways to gain insight.
If you look at the younger generation, I doubt it. Korea is a wonderful country full of extremely bright and nice people. But they're caught in an education arms race that is legitimately terrifying. Kids are schooled with incredible tenacity from 9 to 5 and then once they are finished school they attend night classes and weekend classes. I think putting a much higher weight on fluid intelligence over crystallized intelligence in the CSAT might be useful for mitigating this dynamic. However, I'm not sure what could be done do avoid the equally terrifying working hours dynamic.
I wonder what impact Korean reunification would have. I imagine it would create a large leisure class, supported by a new North Korean cheap-labor underclass, with which would come a leisure culture which could impact the overall culture. Some bad, with some good.
I sort of think tests of crystallized intelligence, after a certain point, are basicly very inefficient marshmallow tests, tests of diligence rather than valuable abilities. I suspect relying near-exclusively on tests of fluid intelligence would work much better and would allow Korean children to avoid throwing their leisure time on a pyre, as there are extremely limited returns to studying for general intelligence tests.
As much of this is a status game, I doubt an underclass would mitigate it at all.
I think your understanding of class is off. I mean, what would an underclass really do to turn south koreans into a leisure class? The point of working crazy hard is to jostle for position with the people at or above your social position.
9 to 5 school sounds like a breeze compared to China. Kids in China are doing 7 to 7 while in middle school (with piles of homework to do during lunch break and in the evening). In high school there is no leaving campus except for once a month.
It is common for high-achieving US high schools to do similar hours too.
My alarm was set to 6:15 AM (I optimized it so I could sleep in as late as possible -- perfected the art of getting ready in 15 minutes because I was in such a zombified state of sleep deprivation every morning), got to school at 7 AM trying my best to concentrate for the next 8 hours on fast-paced AP honors coursework.
School ended at 3 PM, and that didn't mean "time to go home" -- a full plate of after school activities lasted until 7 PM (I did cross country and track so that meant running 6+ miles).
When I got home, I had 5+ hours of homework (most of the work was busywork and not helpful prep for the AP tests, either -_-) to do, and I need at least an hour of time for mental sanity to decompress and play Counter-Strike right before bedtime, often this ended up being 2 or 3 hours, perpetuating the cycle. I would have lost my mind otherwise...
Weekends were spent catching up on sleep, studying for the SATs, and finishing the huge backlog of homework that accumulated during the week, but that's when I didn't have to travel several hours by bus to all-day track meets on Saturdays.
I'm doing a startup now, and it's not NEARLY as much work as American top tier college-bound high school.
That's a lot more extracurricular activity and exercise than average Chinese students get. And forget about computer games. Many students are not allowed to use a cellphone on weekdays. Once they go off to college, however, they experience the first taste of freedom and some become addicted to computer games as attested by the abundance of internet cafes near college campuses.
Yes, exercise was a means to an end. College adcoms want well-rounded students, not narrowly-focused math drones. Applying to top colleges with good academic AND athletic credentials is very important.
I did not have a cellphone in high school. iPhone 1 was released during my senior year. A few of my classmates who were much more well-off than I was had Razr phones, LG keyboard phones, and the like -- all paid for by their parents.
But man, without computer games, I would have lost my mind.
Mind you, all of this is technically optional. I went to a well-funded high school in an affluent suburb, and there were certainly students who had schedules like yours -- I personally knew quite a lot of people whose high-school lives resembled yours -- but there were also a bunch of slackers who just didn't do anything. For as many people like you I knew, I knew just as many stoners (including two guys who were sent to the alternative school multiple times a year because they were too stupid to not get caught with weed on campus). I even knew a few people who dropped out.
I followed the middle path, taking advantage of a quirk of Texas law. You see, I have less than zero interest in athletics and little to no interest in other after-school activities. I wanted to go to college, and my dream involved getting a CS degree, but I couldn't care less about getting into some prestigious private and/or out-of-state school or what have you.
This was good because I live in Texas, and Texas law requires all state universities to accept any in-state student who graduates in the top 10% of their class. So I just made sure to do well in my classes. I participated in virtually no extracurriculars (except one club that only met sporadically because I had a personal interest in it), I took exactly one AP class because I knew I'd breeze through the material (AP CS 1; I would've taken AP CS 2, but it was cancelled my senior year due to lack of enrollment), and I only took a small handful of PreAP/Honors classes because they were in subjects I knew I was good at. My lack of extracurriculars helped me to have the energy to pay attention in class, and I took easy classes (well, easy for me). Hell, I was so good at paying attention in class that I could do virtually no studying outside of class and still ace almost all of my tests. My evenings were free as a bird. As such, I made straight As (and often A+es, which counted for GPA in my high school) in almost everything with little effort. I made the top 10% with about a dozen students between me and the cutoff, and I went to a very nice state university that's known for its CS program.
I made some incredible friends in college, who I'm close to to this day, learned a lot of things that I still use in my thirties, and those four years at a state school were the best years of my life. Whatever else I regret in my life, how I went about my schooling wasn't one of them.
Yes, I should have mentioned that I went to a modestly-funded public high school in a small dying steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -- most of my classmates were the aforementioned stoners as well (they graduated to heroin -- indeed, my county has one of the highest rates for heroin abuse in the country).
For some reason, I believed that I was destined for a better life, I really loved computer programming and I wanted to live in Silicon Valley, and I worked my ass off for it. There were no handouts, and I knew I would be judged with the same yardstick as the kids from the likes of Phillips Exeter with their near-perfect SAT scores, the byproduct of personalized tutoring. The web site College Confidential was my bible. I'm one of the few that left the town, and now I live in Silicon Valley.
Still, I got thin envelopes in the mail from all but one of my reach schools. I took the opportunity I had and ran with it.
I have zero regrets as well. Turned out that playing one hour of Counter-Strike a day instead of five had a much bigger payout.
9 to 5 followed by night classes and weekend classes, which include large amounts of homework. That is their normal school has homework and their separate night/weekend school also assigns homework. It seems basicly comparable.
Is this you? If so, why aren't you seeking out more work to do, since you have so much free time?
I know this sounds snarky, but I have never seen a company that didn't have undone work. And I've rarely met colleagues who didn't appreciate a helping hand when they were busy.
It comes down to cost-benefit: on net, will doing this thing create more positive things (e.g., personal reward, recognition, compensation) than negative things (e.g., dealing with bureaucracy, being hassled, getting entangled in organizational politics)? If it's net negative, there's no reason to do it. Now, that's inherently pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to actual work environments. There's also an argument for recognizing this situation and doing something about it (i.e. quitting to do something else), although that can be easier said than done, depending on one's circumstances.
Likely: zero equity, and a negotiated wage that is less than the opportunity-cost of one's time because it had an expectation of "slack" calculated into it by the employer. Most retail jobs have these properties.
I worked and managed retail for several years. There was always more work that needed to be done. Retail stores are messy, and sales correlate positively with clean, attractive merchandising. Customers are needy, and sales correlate positively with customer service.
I didn't mean "slack" as in "free time because there isn't anything to do"; I meant "slack" as in "extra tolerance because—at a given wage—an average employee will predictably goof off X% of the time."
This is how all large chains (McDonalds, WalMart, etc.) are managed from a corporate perspective. Instead of paying X salary to ensure enough "morale" for optimal worker productivity, it is actually more cost-effective to pay workers a lower wage such that they're sub-optimally productive—but still productive—and then put systems in place to both idiot-proof and peer-quality-check each employee's output, such that the output is still guaranteed even with multiple "malfunctioning" process-nodes potentially touching it.
The epitome of this approach is seen in how an "automatic" Amazon Mechanical Turk work pipeline operates at scale: a program hands off work-items to workers, and then treats each individual work-product as being of unknown quality, handing it off to further workers to give a quality-judgement to it, cross-checking those workers' opinions in case some of them are just mashing "good", etc. None of this would be necessary if the work paid well-enough for market-forces to apply (i.e. if people would want to compete for the work.) But since it doesn't pay, people aren't interested in one-upping one-another's quality to steal the job, so you just end up with whoever decided to wander in.
See also: the economic "Losers" in the MacLeod Hierarchy.
Why? Can you elaborate on this point? What makes you so certain that doing so is bad for our brains? Bad in what way? Is the badness cumulative and irreparable? Is it temporary and reversible? Maybe it's good for our brains because it's less stressful than trying to cram 15 hours work in a 9 hour day.
What would you change? If you were a manager, would you expect people to put in only 2 hours of actual work per day, regardless of when their butt is in the seat?
