For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.
Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):
- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)
- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).
- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).
I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.
I would add that there are also cases where it’s the other way around—where the employer actually insists that employees work only a set number of hours (X), but the staff voluntarily puts in additional time (Y) without tracking it.
In fact, I’ve seen this happen more often in European companies than situations where employers pressure staff to work longer hours.
- You sign a waiver on day 1.
Tracking time of people in shit call center jobs, or with highly repeatable tasks is very straight forward.
Aren't the lower European salaries to be considered not compensating the worker?
And then we haven't even taken cost of living, lifetime healthcare costs, retirement benefits, and social security into account.
Of course, but if we consider ground truth, there's very few salaried workers in Europe making 75k unless they have political positions.
So if the American employer is cheating their workers out of 20% of their salary by making them work unpaid overtime. What should we say about the European employer who follows overtime rules to the book, but pays their workers 50% of what the American employer does?
> And then we haven't even taken cost of living...
Irrelevant. This is a transaction strictly between employer and employee. Reimbursement should be according to what the worker delivers to the company, and European workers are probably on about the same level of productivity as American.
On the whole, remote work gave workers more agency. That highlighted that the control that some layers of management weakened in some ways. It also highlights that poor processes are more easily exploited. Companies don’t vet their employees well where that is important, but not mandated by customer contracts… thus we’ve learned that many frauds are trivially accomplished if you never see people.
On the flip, less remote may ultimately be in the employees interest. If you’re some high level JPMC employee making $500k from your ski cottage in Vermont… well let’s say your NYC salary doesn’t reflect the market, and if you can succeed in Vermont, you can probably be replaced by someone making $100k in Iowa, $50k in Latin America or less in Asia.
The loudest voices on HN and other places about the awesomeness of remote work are really celebrating their success arbitrage… which always cuts both ways.
CEOs are not the living embodiment of a company. They are an agent with their own values too.
There are plenty of smaller start ups that are remote only. There are also companies boot strapping so they again are not making news with funding rounds.
TLDR Just because something is not in the news does not mean it does not exist.
I mean we've all experienced the feeling of "I want to get this done but there just isn't enough time." Taking more hours of your day just exhausts you more, but eliminating a task that doesn't help you, whether it be busywork or a commute, is fantastic. If given the choice between sitting in traffic and knocking things off my to do list, what kind of freak would choose the former?
Oftentimes profit means hiring more people, not pay existing people more.
isn't that normal for engineers? the sentiment you're expressing is one I can relate to more for employees who are only compensated with salary
Meanwhile, some managers and even teammates seem to care more about the hours you clock than whether you crossed the finish line. I’ve never fully understood that mindset. Why glorify effort over results, especially in knowledge work?
There are plenty of us who became extremely productive and can finally enjoy life rather than constantly play the spectacle in the office or sit in traffic for hours. And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.
And don't get me started on the ones who are neurodiverse or have any kind of disability.
My own anecdotal experience: I'm on the spectrum, albeit pretty high functioning, and diagnosed ADHD Inattentive type. WfH has really allowed me to excel in my work like I never have before, especially in the early days.
Working in office is exhausting for me. I have a lot of tics/stims that I have to try and mask when around others, the lighting is usually horrible and distracting, open office plans or cubicles are a sensory nightmare. Just trying to mask alone is exhausting enough that I can't focus on work at all, and my performance suffers from it, and I get burned out really fast.
Now, I get to be comfortable in my own skin at home. I have my office set up exactly how I want, I can wear whatever I want, and at my job there's no expectation of cameras on for meetings. One of the best benefits, for me, is almost everything is done via written communication now. I take very few phone calls, and outside of meetings, all communication is done over chat or email. There's no one to just barge into my workspace to ask a question, interrupting my focus, which would essentially ruin the entire day's of productivity for me.
I also have a delayed circadian rhythm, and having to commute can be dangerous. There are many times that I just can't wake up enough in the morning to be alert enough to drive, even after a full night of restful sleep. I still have this problem, but with WfH I no longer have to drive, and there's some flexibility to start whenever I want as long as I'm on the first meeting of the day or there's no urgent tickets waiting for me (I'm not a dev, I'm a sysadmin).
With in office work, I can ask for accommodations, but it's difficult and has a stigma to ask "I need my own office, with a door, with plenty of natural light, my own control of overhead lighting, and for people to not interrupt me. Oh and I need flexibility to be able to come in whenever I want within a 2 hour window because some mornings I just can't wake up enough to be safe driving."
Lastly, there's no pressure to "fake work" or pretend to be productive beyond my own limits. Like one of the commenters earlier said, most people especially in knowledge work are probably only truly productive 4 to maybe 5 hours of the work day. I'm totally dead after about 4 hours of real work, so an 8 hour work day just doesn't make sense to me. When at home I can go do other things when I'm done with my work for the day, and just have alerts on my phone for tickets or calls/chat messages, I don't have to stay at my desk and pretend to work.
So yeah, WfH has been a godsend for me and I couldn't ever go back to in office work. I have no ambitions for promotions or management, so I plan to stick with this job basically until I retire so long as they continue to allow WfH. If that doesn't pan out, not sure what I'll do. While everyone else was down about the COVID lockdowns, it was basically some of the best times of my life and I was the happiest I've been in a while. WfH, less crowds, less traffic, and grocery stores had sensory hours.
Overwork can be corrosive to productivity and quality, but that can happen in-office, as much as at home.
But also, working at home does require self-discipline, and not everyone is able to do that. It's also like being a manager, or a company owner. These require a certain type of personality/skillset, and not everyone has it. There's a good possibility that we need external structure. I know folks who rented a desk in a local incubator, during COVID, because they needed the time away from home.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the most materially successful people in history, have been right bastards, in life. There's a lot to be said for a healthy work/life balance.
As far as neurodiverse folks; some of them can do very well at home.
During the WFH era which for me was 2017 - 2022, I made up for the 9 - 10 hour workdays by not using up PTO for doctor appointments, car repair shop trips, and so on. This worked reasonably well - and nobody minded if I was getting my oil changed or sitting for an hour at a doctor’s office lobby and responsive on Slack. It was a compromise that worked reasonably well.
We also carved out time for people to pick up/drop off kids at school. In exchange, the work day expanded from basically 8 to 5 or 9 to 6. Everyone was comfortable with this. I certainly didn’t mind people on my team doing this at all and really appreciated the extra availability - we just knew to plan around the school pick up and drop off times, which were also in the calendar as a recurring meeting.
What’s not working now is imposing RTO and trying to have the same extended hours. Sorry, but no, I’m not going to drive in from 7-8, work from 8-6 without breaks, and then drive home from 6-7.
Remote work killed the concept of core hours. I started seeing meetings at 7am and 7pm as well as late messages because everyone was flexing their time. So yes, work hours did increase.
* Don't install any company apps or log in to any company accounts on your phone.
* Set your working hours in your calendar and stick to them.
* Set your Slack status to automatically show you as away and snoozed outside your working hours.
* When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.
I've never received any complaints from sticking to this pattern. When I'm in my working hours I'm consistently reachable and I do my job, when I'm not you can't get hold of me if you try. This is how it was in the office, I don't see why the expectation should be different in WFH.
I do think that a key thing that makes this work well for me is that I'm consistently online during (and only during) my specified hours, rather than mixing and matching my schedule on a day to day basis. I'm not always reachable, but I'm predictably unreachable.
They now stuck to their hours, got used to saying no, but worked hard while they were 'at work'. Part of the thinking was this moved them out of the group who were always staying on to finish something off, which can make you look ill-prepared or behind - despite the fact that you only there are you are taking on additional work.
I think this became the driving force of "always at work". When you sit at home all day, you're online. And the inevitable "let me just check..." habit I know I formed starts to occur. At some point its 6 or 7pm as you're playing catch up on work and since its still "early" its fine to respond to that small email or Slack message. Next thing you know its 11 or 12 at night and you're still sitting on the computer browsing or working or doing something in between. The 24/7 chatroom is always open and there's always someone willing to socialize.
Once I've logged out of my work account it has never happened that I'd log back in the same evening, open the VPN, restart the browser etc just for a quick check of emails or chat messages.
It's a stupid thing but I started doing that at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns and have kept it up ever since.
Some of this is a 'me' problem, needing to remember to disconnect from the world and all of the literal fires going on. I've been using the hyperbole that essentially my brain "exploded", so I deleted Reddit, been on an unsubscribe phase with my YouTube channels, and joined some smaller communities. That last one still keeps me online, but I look at as smaller community means silly memes and a group of people that eventually clock out for the night.
It's so much more quiet! I missed this.
But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.
We're living in a mad world.
Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the industry after being in it so long but this struck me. I haven’t felt this way about any company, good or bad, in a long time. After surviving probably my 10th layoff across 5 different companies I can’t imagine ever being loyal, considering anyone at a company a “friend”, and most certainly not “family”.
I agree with your feeling that remote has really made me more productive. But I believe that’s because of the opposite of what you stated. I loved the ability to get a bunch of stuff done and then zone out the rest of the day. Without the constant interruptions, open office, etc I was able to get one giant burst of productivity and then check out. I was on paper “10x” and just omitted the fact I was only working 2/3 time.
Recently with RTO and myself being remote only I’ve been led to burnout. The company I am at has changed the merit equation from good work to showing up to the office. As a result, I end up picking up more slack during my workday as my coworkers get lunches, game rooms, parties, etc. I am still expected to grind and they are not. I sure do miss the remote first days.
I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.
If anything remote work gave me flexibility. There might be some days I'm cranking code for close to 8 hours straight and others where I work maybe 3-4 hours because I have other things on my plate.
> You're Right You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings
But ... you are doing less work and more of your meetings are a complete waste of time.
Having happy workers is, obviously, worse for the company than literal days of useless chit chats and coffee breaks.
The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.
I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.
If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.
Off topic: I think that’s generally true in an 8 hr work day, but I find in a 10 hr work day I can actually be productive for up to 7 hrs. It’s a non linearity due to chunking.
When I worked 8 hrs, I spent mornings reading news, did a bit of work (1-2 hours), then it was lunch time, then surfed a bit to ease my way back to work, and worked a couple hours (another 1-2 hours) and then it was time to go home —- leaving at 4:45 because if I left any later I had to fight traffic. So you’re right - about 4 hours.
Nowadays, I work a 10 hr work day, and I can actually squeeze about 7 productive hrs in. I do a bit of work in the morning (2 hrs), then lunch and then some news reading, and then back to work (3 hrs) until 3pm when I go for a walk. When I get back at 4pm, I still have 2 more hours so I manage to get more work in because 2 hours is enough time to start something substantial. In an 8 hr work day, I’m already getting ready to go home so am not inclined to start anything new.
The chunking works so much better in a 10 hr work day. Humans are poor context switchers, and it’s hard to start back up. But a longer work day lets me account for the startup time, and gives me more productive chunks of time. Traffic is also better after 6pm. 10 hr work days are also more leisurely because there are two long breaks (lunch and afternoon)
Of course I’m not advocating for this - folks have kids and other hobbies, and you shouldn’t have to give your employer more hours than contracted. But I’m just saying if one has to extract more productive hours in a work day, this seems to work.
Or do as the Germans do. I worked out of Germany once and saw that everyone worked 3 hrs, then 30 minute lunch, and then 4 hours. Coffee breaks sprinkled in between, but everybody was almost robotic in their focus.
You may be less productive after 5 hours of work, but even if your output 50% less in the next 5 hours, you'll still produce more by working more.
Employers don't care about productivity, they care about your total output. And it's not only employers, if you want to improve or pass a selective test or anything, you have to put the hours.
There may be some threshold where more work becomes detrimental, but it's definitely not 5 hours.
>its definitely not five hours
Why are you so sure?
And frankly, 5 hours a day isn't that much. It's perfectly fine is some people wants work life balance, but you will do more by working more, and if you're ambitious, it's hard to avoid putting the hours at some critical moments in your life.
Long, sustained hours are more of a problem; in the US we routinely overwork doctors to the point of risking deadly error--in part because the standards of long hours during residencies were developed by William Stewart Halsted, a cocaine addict who worked 100+ hours per week.
That depends very much on your work
The four to six hours of 30/45/60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I'm actively participating or not.
It's easier if you're a morning person, since you can do all of your "life stuff" before work. However, I'm not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I'm confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.)
(I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I'll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the "free" time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.)
Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I'm at customer sites. It feels much, much easier.
For me, a big part of it is environment. When I'm home, I want to do "home" stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I'm in an "office", I'm in work mode. I'm locked in. It's much easier for me to focus on work things this way.
It was not that it was fundamentally bad, maybe a tad too academic, just overhyped beyond it's maturity and capabilities at the time.
It did not feel as quirky as C++'s paradigm neutrality, and less esoteric (syntactically) than Lisp, so all in all in theory a welcome hi gh level language with decent perks. But if you are going to push adoption by preaching to the managerial class with half thruths, expect some pushback (remember write once, debug everywhere?).
Then the second wave with colsultancyware feature adoption (anyone like CORBA?) and becoming academia's darling (I heard you like frameworks, so I put a framework in your framework so you can meta-factory your own DSl framework at runtime!) made it so that when later .NET arrived, it felt like Java, the good parts.
Of course, .NET would go on to become a monster in itself. But that is another story.
sublinear•6h ago
This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place.
Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it.
The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.
AStonesThrow•6h ago
It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve.
However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time.
But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one.
Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them!
But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized.
So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.
Loughla•6h ago
Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process.
Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?
azornathogron•6h ago
You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things.
This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description.
It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.
DanielHB•6h ago
This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases.
And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc).
Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.
wiseowise•6h ago
Bean counters want their cake and eat it too.
I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)
Bjartr•6h ago
sublinear•6h ago
Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.
guappa•6h ago
pards•6h ago
Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it.
Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.
_Algernon_•5h ago
arccy•2h ago
jjk166•4h ago
tbrownaw•5h ago
Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.
sublinear•3h ago
I'm not saying that hours aren't relevant at all. I'm saying that tracking hours towards tasks is a totally separate concern that should be decoupled from the workday and individual time management in general. This is especially true if your employees are on salary and often on-call as well.
wisty•5h ago
Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs).
Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company.
Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.
sublinear•3h ago
I think you'll find plenty of real world reasons if you listen to the experiences of employees and contractors.
thewebguyd•3h ago
This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests.
Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.
deadbabe•4h ago