Why would you want to keep your job in an environment like that though? The only thing I can think is there will be a lot of openings above you... Or you're on an H1B visa? Or maybe you're being vastly overpaid.
It's not a cultists devotion. It's business. Your competitor can exceed you if you aren't willing to pull all nighters.
Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.
Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.
This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.
Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?
If you did that, you would be very silly.
Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.
Honestly I think your comment shows part of the problem here, though I do understand your point. But if "mere" employees feel that they are personally in competition with basically the rest of the world it easily becomes a war of attrition and employees become kind of soldier-ants. I'd rather be my own person thank you very much.
People can in fact be loyal and productive in 8 hours per day without being a slacker and maybe have some energy left to partake in society outside of work. Nobody likes people with a bad work-ethic but if a good work-ethic is considered to require regular overtime than maybe it's time to reconsider that concept.
The unfortunate part is that your company is in competition with the rest of the world.
I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.
Well run companies do not do all nighters (except in exceptional circumstances).
I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).
All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.
I worked once for an investment bank and there it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum. It wasn't because of their sympathy, it was due to the fraud prevention :-) Forced 2 week long vacation, locked out access to the systems for that period of time.
Frauds are very often hidden or disguised as "bad investments" (yeah banks do mistakes as any other human beings) and covered with money from "slush funds". When they are on vacations, rogue traders cannot cover their intentional bad investments, losses, close warning notifications and so on. More kn this topic here https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/1995...
Two reasons: lots of fraud requires continual maintenance, and when you're away someone will presumably take over your duties and might notice what you're doing.
> it was mandatory to take once in year min 2 week vacation minimum
That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.
Not sure why you would make a photo of a sleeping colleague but besides that if I understand it correctly the person sleeping had managing role? I always like it when manager stay and be accessible when they asked you to work late. Nothing worse when a manager ask you to do overtime and then themselves go home. Quickly stopped doing overtime when that happened.
When I worked at SpaceX, I slept in the office a handful of times. It wasn't out of an apparent obligation to work long hours, but because I was indeed doing something awesome at the time, like remotely flying a space ship. Of course, Elon Musk's expectation was for everyone to work themselves to their limit, and he praised the folk putting in 80 hours per week. I myself found success in confidently maintaining a sustainable work-life balance, and never felt pressured to work longer than I wanted to.
Oh no, nothing as meaningful as that! More like, Elon would explicitly disqualify them from his scorn when addressing the company. :-)
I don't think the people that are successful working close with Elon Musk are the type that need constant validation. In my experience of having occasional day-to-day interactions, he's awkward but means well. He's just laser focused on solving problems, and it never stops. Sometimes the solution is to pay for an employee's laser eye surgery on a whim. Sometimes the solution is to fire a dozen people.
Are you specifically asking about financial compensation? There was the occasional token salary bump, bonus or stock option grant. Nothing to get too excited about. We would all laugh/cry about getting 0.7% raises and then go to the bar. I was never concerned about the details of my compensation while there, and I didn't spend any energy worrying about it. I just focused on making space ships. Financially and career-wise, it's embarrassing how positively fruitful my time there was. By far the best choice I could have made coming out of school.
When you get older you will realize that praise means absolutely nothing. All it did was make Elon and the stake holders richer while you skipped on family, fun, time off.
Good thing I exercised my SpaceX stock options when I left, then? At this point they're probably worth enough for me to retire. I am 36, married with a 4 year old and a newborn baby, for which I am taking the rest of the year off from working.
Indeed, I do joke that I was the one employee that left the company when I was happy rather than burnt out! I don't think my overall experience was in the minority, though? It's not like everyone was dropping like flies. I don't know anyone that was injured from work while I was there. I have plenty of friends that worked there long after I did, and I don't think any of them regret it. I also never saw a lay-off while there. A small number of people got fired for performance reasons, but other than being unpleasant, it seemed like a positive change for both parties.
Where do you get an accurate valuation for spacex equity? Isn't it private and heavily dependent on government contracts? Hasn't musk said he doesn't care about it being profitable because he needs to get someone pregnant on mars to save humanity?
Taking a year of parental leave is just a normal thing in most developed countries.
The company's value is determined each funding round, based on how much investors are willing to pay. Whether you consider that accurate or not, the company provides some liquidity through tender offers. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-employees-offer-sell-s...
There's also secondary markets, where people are willing to pay a premium for any shares they can get their hands on. That's not in the company's best interest, though, and so it is discouraged.
I believe Elon needs SpaceX to be incredibly profitable in order to fund his Mars ambitions. I think his point is that the company's finances are a means rather than an end?
I'm not bragging about paternity leave, I was responding to the parent post's claim that I sacrificed quality family time and would regret it. The opposite is true; my time spent working there has had a compounding effect on my finances and career opportunities. I've had the luxury of working on my own terms for many years, on meaningful projects intrinsically worth my time. My memories of working at SpaceX grow fonder with age.
Keep up! These days the trend has changed. We have gone the other end now. "I work from 10am and start chilling out at 2pm and make much more money than before." (this is what they say, but not what they do)
Even as a passionate twenties-something engineer I would see my productivity and output fall off a cliff after 6-7 hours of work even if I had a lunch or tea/coffee break in the middle. I was fortunate to work for a lot of very cool bosses who essentially forced me out of office and occasionally gently teased me for working at night at home. I didn't realise how critical this was until I worked very briefly for another shop in the middle for a few weeks that demanded you finish everything within the same day to fit their scrum metrics. I could feel every ounce of energy sapped away after 6PM (after starting the day at 9AM) and had zero motivation to get anything done even though they demanded I stay. I was getting nothing done until they let us leave at post-10PM and I had basically spent hours staring at my screen. Left there as soon as I could
Totally. I fall on this sometimes because I like my job. And it is still immediatelly clear that quality goes up if you work normal hours and exercise instead of 12 hour pulls
I'm 44 years old and I've been doing this since before a lot of HN folks were born. A lot a lot of all-nighters and all-dayers and all-weekenders.
And you know what? Mostly it wasn't worth the time I could have spent elsewhere.
If all-nighters will make you rich, by all means, pull em. And then once you're rich, STOP.
But if all you're doing is spending your time and youth and energy to make somebody else rich and don't get rich yourself, you're a sucker. And if that person expects you to do 30 hours at a time at your workstation so they can get rich, and you do it, they're a scumbag and you're their bitch.
Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever. I wasted so many hours, days, years of my life putting my heart and soul and guts into startups that nobody remembers, that mostly never made any mark or ripple anywhere, and I never got rich doing it.
Now I get up at 8am, I start working at 9am, I peace the fuck out at 5pm and I don't think about work code until 9am the next morning. On weekends and evenings I write my own code, and I hang out with my wife and my cat and I watch old movies.
That sounds like old people shit when you're 22 and all this stuff is new and you think that if you just put in enough crunches, that sempai or the Money Gods will notice you and throw some your way. And yet there are millions of us in this industry, and a lot of us are well paid, but most of us don't ever get rich and we damn sure don't change the world. We just make useless crap that makes rich dudes richer that will be utterly forgotten by history, and that's not worth giving up your youth and energy and life to.
I know most of y'all won't believe me. That's how this whole youth/middle age thing works, right? Stupid old man who never got successful grousing at the kids.
But man, I'd give anything to have not done most of the work I've ever done for other people, and spent that time wandering penniless around the world instead. Or had better luck early enough to make enough money to stop working a long time ago. But the key word there is "luck". That's almost always all it is.
Go home at 5, man. Trust me. The code and the capitalism will still be there in the morning, but that great meal, that night of partying, that mysterious stranger across the bar? They may not be.
I definitely come from the "clock out at 5:30" train of thought but:
> Not once has my overtime paid off in any sense - not even been recognised, costing both my physical and mental health.
I hard disagree. In an environment where the norm, and expectation is to leave on time, a _very rare_ overtime ask can make a significant difference. There's a difference between an occasional ask of overtime, and a culture of the team working 50+ hour weeks. In that world, the difference between a 50 hour and a 55 hour (i.e. 2 evenings of staying later than normal) is minimal, and doesn't pay off.
Some of my biggest successes in my career have been because of overtime, a very occasional weekend, but they are the absolute exception, not the norm.
Same. My median week is less than 40 hrs. But I have occasions of flow state or critical problems that I just can’t let go (not to mention lots of shower cycles spent thinking about work), and I think it’s been good for my career.
42, and learned the hard way as well -- it has serious ramifications both on your personal physical and mental health, as well as your relationships. I get more out of my team by treating them as humans that I know have a life outside of work; I want them to have a healthy work life balance, and I will lead by example.
50+ and I had lots of all-nighters. Once when I was usually leaving at 6am other were coming to work. Home, bed, breakfast, showering, back to work at 10am.
52. Not been pulling all-nighters (okay maybe once or twice in exceptional circumstances that were also appreciated as such by the management after) as I've always believed your point to be right. If you're not (in part) owning the company then it should not be your life unless you don't have one and don't care.
To each his own but an environment where overtime is the norm (even if driven by employees themselves) is not a healthy place to be when you have a family.
Besides, when a company is so successful to need more than the normal hours available then the onus is on the leadership to hire more people; it's in their best interest to not have to rely on such devotion.
...and if crunch-time is instead caused by the company _not_ being successful and not having the money to hire people then toxicity is pretty much guaranteed in short order.
I'm 30. I realised this as soon as I entered the workforce. I can count on one hand the number of times I've work passed 5pm and I've never stayed after 7pm.
Me not so much. I have done way too many spec work when I started working. Basically it’s slave labour.
If you read this fresh from graduation and you think people give you opportunities, and “chances” by working for free, or intern stuff, or low ball wages with the “promise” of upgrading… skip that stuff. To people just starting out and anyone : you are a business. More money needs to come in than energy wasted and going out. Your year ends balance should be positive, both monetary and energy wise. At the end of the year, not just 3 years into a startups future that might never arrive.
I did that shit at 22! Not built for long hours and never was. I deeply connect with the mathematicians apology where he says 4 hours is enough work then watch cricket. Although I prefer to say kayak or something. In remember being that age and angry that my boss wanted me to work through lunch to fix some absent persons bug. Because I had done 5 hours already and humans need a break.
I worked for a new business once, and they whinged because "everyone else stays past 5:30 but you always leave on time". I just replied "it's not my business". They never said anything again.
However, that established clear boundaries. Once - and only once - I went in on a weekend for some out of hours work (a database migration or something), and in the following pay review they gave me a large raise specficially citing that I worked when they needed me. If I'd always provided free labour I doubt I'd have got the same raise.
The funny thing was, they asked me once what they could do to improve things and I suggested flexitime. They said they'd get back to me.
A few days later they came back and said, "we're going to be honest. Everyone else out there stays past 5:30 for nothing. We're not legally allowed to only give you flexitime, so we won't give it to anyone since they already work for free". Fair enough. My colleagues trying to earn brownie points screwed us all over by providing free work.
Boundaries are important. Don't let bosses treat you like a mug.
Ah, but the point people are making in this thread is completely different. It is against working late without pay. One of the companies I made the most money in at the beginning of my career was one where often worked 7 days a week. But on weekdays I left at 5pm and I got more money for overtime weekend pay than in the rest of the month.
Many of the roles folks are discussing here don't offer overtime payments. We're expected to comply with a wee line in our contracts that goes along the lines of "from time to time you may be required to work additional hours....". Then it turns out "from time to time" means every week and you don't get paid overtime or time off in lieu.
But even if I was offered paid overtime, and at a rate higher than my regular salary, I wouldn't work overtime. I'm in my mid-50's and Monday to Friday, 9am-5:30pm is enough time to spend doing work. I have hobbies and interests outside of work that are far more interesting.
>Many of the roles folks are discussing here don't offer overtime payments. We're expected to comply with a wee line in our contracts that goes along the lines of "from time to time you may be required to work additional hours....".
Wait, what?? Every single of my employment contracts had a line like this, but I always assumed it was paid work. I can't imagine it meaning "from time to time you may be required to work additional hours for free". In fact all the contracts I remember that had this sentence also had an "overtime" section where there were things like:"if you work over 10h on a weekday every additional hour is at overtime pay rate of 1.5x, all hours worked on Saturday are at 1.5x rate, Sundays and Bank Holidays at double rate". That was pretty much standard in many companies I worked at. So not only the contract stated those additional hours were paid. They were worth more than the "normal time" beyond a certain amount of time worked per day.
In addition one company I worked at even had a section in there that if I work more than 24h straight there must be at least 24h of rest. If I work Sundays I have an option of taking Sunday double pay or having a weekday off no later than 14 days later if I want. Etc. Etc. Good companies exist. Anyone miserable in their work, please do look for a better place. Unfortunately many people just don't like changing jobs. My own sister was "stuck" in a miserable job for 5 years because I couldn't convince her to put real effort into looking for another one.
However, having said all that I have to say I had ocassional situations for various reasons when I didn't claim overtime. There are times one can benefit more by not asking for overtime.
For example I once had a job at a small family run business with a profit share bonus at the end of the year. That bonus was worth a lot more to me than throwing a wrench in the works by declining to work on some emergency in a middle of a night for sake of a few hours of overtime here and there. And during my time there the business went from employing 4 people in a basement to 30 people in a shiny new "office unit" in a business park. I had a big share in this success and I was compensated well there.
Then another job was in a large company that paid me more than double of what I made before as a normal daily rate. I think there was an office move on a weekend once when I never claimed overtime for because my request for an overtime form were met with silence. It was worth more to me to "give up that overtime" than raise stink for my manager risking my contract will not get renewed.
So my point is, you should decide if you want to be paid overtime. Is your free time worth double the money to you or is it unsellable? Perhaps you have family you prefer to spend time with? If you do, look for a job that treats you well.
That is why one of the worst things that can happen to an economy IMO is unemployment. I'll take inflation every day over unemployment. Sure inflation consumes your savings, but high rate of unemployment makes work miserable for everyone. I still remember when we used to have 20% unemployment in the 90s in Poland. Back them the power dynamic was such that when your boss asked you to work overtime you didn't even ask for an overtime form. You pretended to be glad the company offers you great opportunity to spend time with them on a weekend instead of being "bored at home". Seriously, I had colleagues say this to me with a straight face.
In my ~5 jobs have all been “salary” pay with no mention of overtime compensation. I think that’s most common in US for engineers unless your a contractor or something.
Just on the wrong side of my mid-50's here. The previous company I worked for completely burned me out when was 50-51 after they were bought out. I'd been with them for a long time (double figures). I was then made redundant and took a break. I ended up despising the industry I'd once enjoyed working in. I did a bit of freelancing but my heart wasn't in it any more.
Then Covid came along in 2020 and my freelance work dried up. I reluctantly and fearfully started looking for full time work and was lucky to join a company that takes good care not to burn out their staff. Been here now for a decent amount of time and rarely work more than my contracted 37.5 hours a week, and it's fully remote.
> Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever.
This. I was made promises about being "looked after" by the last company, especially around the time it was up for sale. It was all bullshit.
In the end, work your contracted hours then go home/switch off. Don't let your life be held hostage by companies that expect you to burn both ends of the candle. Burn out is no fun.
> If all-nighters will make you rich, by all means, pull em. And then once you're rich, STOP.
What is rich? 100k? 5m? 100m? I know what your answer will be: "you decide what is rich". Well, maybe the people who work a lot want to be a lot more rich than you.
I doubt anyone will trade becoming rich for meeting mysterious strangers at bars and partying at night. Both these things involve drinking, and really it's just a drug out of misery.
Ultimately, your gripe is not that you worked a lot but just that you didn't make money out of it. Now, you are just fantasizing and romanticizing being penniless (without ever being in such a situation).
I got to observe a similar thing firsthand in Japan: People staying late into the night, sleeping at their desks, wearing themselves out, even to the point of karoshi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi ).
But in terms of actual productivity, I observed lots of activity and little actual achievement. What buoyed their productivity was the technology of a freshly rebuilt economy and industry post-WW2, which, coupled with a few innovative ideas, gave Japanese industry a powerhouse advantage to the point that it almost didn't matter what the workers did. They could have worked 2 hours a day and still had the same output (not the factory line workers, of course).
When the economy went sour in the 90s, there was no change in work ethic; people still worked late into the night, and still had the same levels of activity with the same levels of achievement, but the technological industrial advantage had dissipated over the years and they were no longer competitive. Same input, less output.
Long hours work against you. We've studied this to death, and the results are clear.
It's less not accepting and more not being able to opt into it. The gap in income, job security and status between permanent hires (salarymen) and temporary roles (haken, freeter, etc) is massive and getting worse every day.
Well, I had an interesting experience as one of few westerners in a western branch of aJapanese company that had 200+ of Japanese staff. We westerners left every single day at 5pm (unless there were real technical emergencies). All of the Japanese had to stay to approximately 8pm. Sometimes longer.
Despite the fact this is actually illegal in the "host country" they still did it with no overtime paid(or claimed)
. I had many Japanese friends in this company over the years and I knew they would much prefer to be off at 5pm as we were, but every time we talked about it it turned out they are 100% powerless to change it. The company not only provides a prestigious job (which was extremely important), but also provided housing in the host country, a visa, good schools for the kids etc. Additionally, every time we discussed it I got an impression they really have it easy here in comparison to how much they would have to work back in Japan. So all those people really didn't want to be sent back.
On the rare occasion when I had to work on a weekend and overnight, HR contacted me asking me to fill the overtime form :-o
I write this not as a complaint. I considered it one of my best jobs and if not that I wanted to be in a different role I would still be there, but even now years later I still remember having this weird feeling of there being a very real discrimination against other people on the basis of culture and not being able to do anything about it.
The 90s success of Japan’s economy and technology was pretty much put to stop by the manipulations of US government. It is quite disgusting in terms of free trade and open economy.
That link doesn't really give the full details. The Plaza Accord was agreed between 5 major economies (US, Germany, Japan, UK, France) to depreciate the dollar against those other currencies.
If we take this statement in the link:
> the intention of the Plaza Accord was to correct trade imbalances between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Japan
Then:
a) Why were Britain and France interested and why are they completely omitted from the article?
b) Why didn't Germany end up in the mire like Japan?
It seems to me that Japan's officials agreed to something that either didn't suit its economy or the management of its economy was subsequently mishandled (not hard to believe given the ~25 years of finance scandals that are linked to the heart of government[1] - it's not hard to imagine things weren't any better in the preceding 15). As such, I'd also be very interested to know what OP was referring to because I'd find it hard to believe if it was the Plaza Accord.
Apparently overtime is... included in advance taking the average for the company, so people feel obliged to do it since technically they already got paid.
It's basically like that team-building exercise with a dozen people trying to move a broomstick down when each person is holding it with one finger. The default reaction is to send it flying.
In any case 40% of Japanese workers are part-time - I've met one - she lived in Italy and her line of work was writing articles about life there and she couldn't pick up more hours even if she wanted to. She said it was increasingly common for people to be employed like that.
> In any case 40% of Japanese workers are part-time -
It's actually 45% of Japanese women workers. The percentage of men being part time is much lower around 12%. A big reason why your friend struggles finding anything else is that she's a woman and that Japan is an intensely sexist society.
On the whole, italian part-time hours are fixed. Like fixed. This is to allow people to go to a second, or third, job on time. You can request they change ie come in early, stay later but no is backed up by law. Elastic clauses (contracts) exist, but the employer oays a hefty premium, and even then can only request a certain number/ percentage of hours are 'extra'.
All this is for legal employment,as opposed to cash-in-hand jobs.
> Long hours work against you. We've studied this to death, and the results are clear.
While I get what you are trying to say, but this is not always true. There have been times where I pulled up all nighter and produced good work, specially during college or some project I am deeply invested in. But similar thing can't be achieved in a big org though. If I am expected to work for more than 5-6 hours a day to meet deadline in the office, the quality of work invariably declines.
John Carmack also defended working long hours, and admittedly he is one of the most productive developer.
“We have an emergency, the service is screwed, we really need it not to be”
“We have to deliver by the end of the week but we haven’t finished testing everything, we need some extra effort for the next couple of days to fix and validate as things come up”
These can work, in my experience, but it can’t become routine and you have to be prepared for a higher than average error rate from your people.
> you have to be prepared for a higher than average error rate from your people.
Exactly this. From first hand experience, when forced to deliver under time pressure, I cut corners.
This means, I might be able to deliver the feature. But the tradeoff is it adds technical debt and physical stress, which needs to be dealt with afterwards.
Furthermore, if you have a family, it also takes a toll on family life.
As a manager I friendly told people to leave after 8h of work and then kicked them out after a nudging them friendly and a grace period because I believe developer productivity is limited (as shown in studies) and you should have a life outside the company.
This regularily got me into fights with other execs and CEO who said "Stephan, when I go through technology at 8pm there is no one there, don't we know we're a startup?"
When a friend and I was on business in Japan we wanted to meet someone at 11pm at night. We were waiting in the business complex and lots and lots of people were leaving at that time (11pm!), then we got a call he could not leave. What a sad working culture.
Not only that, but people should be encouraged to take time off entirely. IMO, if you're not taking at least 3 weeks a year off, you're probably damaging your ability to do your best work. (Are there any studies on this?)
> IMO, if you're not taking at least 3 weeks a year off, you're probably damaging your ability to do your best work
Make that more like 5 weeks. The legal minimum here in the UK is 33 days (well, it might be 34 next year but we'll see), which is 5.5 weeks. Every job I've had as a professional has had more leave than that, usually 38-40 days (7.5-8 weeks), and in the last 3-4 years I've also had a weeks office closure during the summer. The feeling of taking a weeks break and coming back and you _not_ having to catch up on what's changed since you left is incredible.
> When a friend and I was on business in Japan we wanted to meet someone at 11pm at night
Do you think this is a carryover from the 1980s, when Japan was a world-leader in semiconductors and personal electronics? Is the thinking that this culture was the reason? And an attempt to return to the glory days?
Or is it more of a social thing? With peer pressure?
Maybe it's a cultural thing but in most of the companies I worked at, this kind of behaviour would be seen as a _manager_ red flag rather than an employee heroism.
As in someone at director level or even HR would come down on the _manager_ for allowing this. The view is either the employee is under delivering or the team is under resourced and in both cases it's a _manager_ problem to be solved.
This is something I never understood in US companies, I mean considering all the concerns with liability and lawsuits everyone seems pretty chilled about squeezing 20 hour days from employees.
I actually don't mind staying late because programming can be fun depending on what you are working on. Having to leave at 5 pm because "time is up" doesn't sound fun.
Family and partners are just one of the numerous, totally valid reasons. Just taking time for private life is more then enough reason, no need to specify or differentiate. You should go home at 5pm and have a cool private life even without family or being married!
At least for men, I feel we need to distance ourselfes from the paradigm of being valued only as disposable providers.
It’s a good point. But in an ideal world you should be able to work more and “exceed expectations” without raising the bar to “meet expectations” for coworkers.
The brain needs rest after a certain amount of work. Neurotransmitters get depleted, mitochondrial stress builds up, all sorts of things happen if you stress neurons for too long. It might feel good at the moment to keep going, but that might actually be harmful, depending on how strong your metabolism and ability to recovery is. You‘ll pay in some way for it - be it lower performance on the next day, insomnia, or perhaps neurologic disease decades later. Rest is crucial.
If you get paid by the hour, sure. But if you are salary, you are reducing your hourly rate by doing this. That means you are cheapening the value of your own time. And you are screwing your co-workers. There is nothing wrong with getting into the flow and working a few hours late. Just tell your boss and leave early on Friday. Even if leaving early means coding on your side project.
Work just gets so unproductive past certain point that you're just doing it to signal others how hard you're working. I had a boss in academia who insisted on having a "5 minute meeting" at 4pm. We'd be scratching our heads at one of his stupid problems still at 7pm when he'd announce he has to leave because he has a family. Usually without exception you'd solve the issues in a minute the next morning after having a good sleep.
I find there's like 4 good hours in the day for actual valuable creative work. The rest can be useful for grunt work, but there's rarely so much critical grunt work that one should exhaust themselves.
I can partially understand overtime when productivity is high enough that any improvements during those 8h would be negligible, and parallelism would not be a good idea (Brook's Law).
Before you ask your employees to do overtime you should find out what their typical day looks like. I have mostly worked for startups during my career, and all the wasted time and interruptions still blow my mind.
To make an analogy, it's like releasing a game with average graphics that a powerful GPU struggles to render, and blaming GPUs for low FPS instead of your poor software. You should optimize your game before you ask players to overclock their cards.
If you like working late and on weekends, then do something like a startup where you’re rewarded for your productivity (in very nonlinear ways). As an employee there is no gain in working late or weekends.
This is the right answer. Instead of arguing with each about how long others should work, realize that everyone is different. People should find ways to work that maximize the value of their work.
What I see is bad leadership, bad management and marketing targeting very dumb people. If there is no vital emergency, like a meteor directing towards earth or losing everything in an extreme matter, it's just a bad choice and break the machine by stress just to replace the pieces later.
Exactly. At the end of the day, it's just Twitter. It's just GitHub. It's just Xamarin. It's just whatever. The world will move on if you don't pressure your employees into pulling all nighters for your "urgent" demands.
I have spent half a career leaving at 5 (and 8 years leaving much earlier to pick up kids who now walk from school again on their own). If I ever as much as heard a mumble about not working enough when I do 40 hours I’d insta-quit that job.
Yes I did some long days occasionally but I did them because I felt it was needed and because it fit my personal life on that day. Not because someone told me it was needed.
True, parents have this weird privilege where they can leave at 4:30pm with some excuse about the kids and leave the rest of us to pick up the slack until 7:30pm...
Well that’s the time I need to pick them up. The alternative would be to quit or work 80% but most employers prefer people to stay on 100% which means doing some emailing in the evenings to catch up with the hours.
4.30 is my normal leave time now without kids though (8-4.30 with a half hour unpaid lunch break is my schedule for 40h/week).
Kids sports practice etc regularly starts at 5PM or even 4PM. Being a parent is just fundamentally incompatible with working past 6PM, at least where I live.
If I may say so you don't have to justify fuck all.
If someone else doesn't understand the boundaries between work and personal life, and tops it off with trying to guilt trip you, then that is on them and whatever corporate/VC kool-aid they are drinking.
You can only wish that this is something they will come to realize (hopefully not too late in their life to avoid unnecessary regret).
I’m lucky enough to live in a country where all this is taken for granted. When I take 6 or 12 months parental leave I just get a pat on the back from both colleagues and management. Same when I leave at 3PM to pick up kids. Everyone understands that this is how it works. Work is something we do when our lives permit it. Not the other way around.
It's not a privilege for parents. Me leaving at 4 or 4.30 doesn't mean someone else has to work until 6PM. That's the key. My childless colleagues leave at 5 or 5.30, every day of every year. And they start later because their morning routine is different. It's true that I'm privileged, but the privilege starts with an important culture of "no one does more than 40h, period". Without that, you have no chance to have a healthy work life balance as a parent or as a non-parent.
For me, it depends on the type of problems you are trying to solve. If you and competitors are fighting side by side to achieve a goal and get a piece of the pie, it's OK
I don't believe in overworking, I believe in steering the work in the wrong direction. Staying at your desk just to attend a meeting, working without feeling like you are contributing much, these things are productivity killers, not the other way around IMHO
Nat is an "investor" now since he's rich. So of course he wants the ICs in companies he invests in to work themselves to death for him. "If you work 26 hours a day like I did, you can be a VC who never needs to work again".
Not everybody with money is a cynical asshole like that. Everything’s I’ve seen written/said by Friedman so far suggests he’s not an asshole at all so I feel like there might be more going on than “poor people good, rich people bad”.
I worked here and never got the impression they disagreed. It never had an impact on me. Rather I have fond memories that Xamarin did remote work right before it became a widespread thing overnight.
The times I worked past my hours were for team dinners/events, problems that piqued my curiosity, and large launches/conferences. All which had me in a bed at a reasonable time.
Ah well, we're all humans with our own blind focus on specific wants and needs.
Most managers are not maniacs. Our capitalistic society just has a lot of bad incentives that are hard to change without damaging its good parts. Spreading power helps to balance things out. I know unions have a bad rep in the US but they do have good merit where government is laissez faire and no, we do not need to go heavy socialist (not meant to imply you were advocating for such). In general I'd wish we'd focus a bit more on societal stability than economic output but we need both.
Fun cultural difference: When I saw the headline I thought it was a negative thing about how long hours he had to work. "Until 5pm!"
But it's meant as positive. "Only until 5pm!". Rush hour in my city on Fridays is like at 14 (2pm). Work 37.5h weeks, but how I spend those hours are mostly up to me as long as I partake in meetings scheduled between 9 and 15.
If I was the CEO or Co Founder of a startup that could see success on the horizon I’d work all night too. The project is very personal and the potential rewards are enormous.
But it makes me furious when those same people want to know why the rank and file aren’t as “dedicated” as they are.
CTO has 30% of the equity. The ‘founding engineer’ they hired has 1.5%. The next few engineers they hired have 0.5%. Pretty obvious why one of those people is OK to sleep at the office and the others have better shit to do!
There is a fucktonne of research that stretches back into the 1930s that strongly indicate that 8hours is about the maximium you can employ someone before they stop being productive.
it just makes logical sense. If you want more productivity, have two shifts.
but at some point people become anti-productive. that takes many forms, some in terms of mistakes that cost time, accidents, or just faffing about and not actually doing work
Building great products is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out is a real thing. Mature leaders know this. The glorifying of working 50+ hours per week is childish and a sign that the culture at that organization is toxic.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread* someone posts the picture of a coworker sleeping in the office at twitter, saying "that's how things work at elon twitter"
* sleeping coworker replies "yeah we're awesome we're doing great things, hashtag SleepWhereYouWork"
* Former Github and Xamarin CEO comments "yeah that's how we do it in the Silicon Valley!"
* Former Xamarin CTO says "Duh at Xamarin I left every day at 5PM to set the tone of the company about work life balance, and people followed my lead"
Edit: fixed some stuff as for the following comments
It's sad and repulsive that there are people with such a cultish devotion to capitalism that they admire this behavior and culture.
Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.
Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.
This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.
Well run companies have adequate resourcing so that staff don't need to work all night
Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?
If you did that, you would be very silly.
Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.
I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.
I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).
All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.
That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.
I don't think the people that are successful working close with Elon Musk are the type that need constant validation. In my experience of having occasional day-to-day interactions, he's awkward but means well. He's just laser focused on solving problems, and it never stops. Sometimes the solution is to pay for an employee's laser eye surgery on a whim. Sometimes the solution is to fire a dozen people.
Are you specifically asking about financial compensation? There was the occasional token salary bump, bonus or stock option grant. Nothing to get too excited about. We would all laugh/cry about getting 0.7% raises and then go to the bar. I was never concerned about the details of my compensation while there, and I didn't spend any energy worrying about it. I just focused on making space ships. Financially and career-wise, it's embarrassing how positively fruitful my time there was. By far the best choice I could have made coming out of school.
Taking a year of parental leave is just a normal thing in most developed countries.
There's also secondary markets, where people are willing to pay a premium for any shares they can get their hands on. That's not in the company's best interest, though, and so it is discouraged.
I believe Elon needs SpaceX to be incredibly profitable in order to fund his Mars ambitions. I think his point is that the company's finances are a means rather than an end?
I'm not bragging about paternity leave, I was responding to the parent post's claim that I sacrificed quality family time and would regret it. The opposite is true; my time spent working there has had a compounding effect on my finances and career opportunities. I've had the luxury of working on my own terms for many years, on meaningful projects intrinsically worth my time. My memories of working at SpaceX grow fonder with age.
https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft
I'd just leave. What can he do? He can't beat me up and force me to stay :D
He hated me very openly though, and refused to write a recommendation letter after the investors pulled out and closed his shitty startup.
And you know what? Mostly it wasn't worth the time I could have spent elsewhere.
If all-nighters will make you rich, by all means, pull em. And then once you're rich, STOP.
But if all you're doing is spending your time and youth and energy to make somebody else rich and don't get rich yourself, you're a sucker. And if that person expects you to do 30 hours at a time at your workstation so they can get rich, and you do it, they're a scumbag and you're their bitch.
Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever. I wasted so many hours, days, years of my life putting my heart and soul and guts into startups that nobody remembers, that mostly never made any mark or ripple anywhere, and I never got rich doing it.
Now I get up at 8am, I start working at 9am, I peace the fuck out at 5pm and I don't think about work code until 9am the next morning. On weekends and evenings I write my own code, and I hang out with my wife and my cat and I watch old movies.
That sounds like old people shit when you're 22 and all this stuff is new and you think that if you just put in enough crunches, that sempai or the Money Gods will notice you and throw some your way. And yet there are millions of us in this industry, and a lot of us are well paid, but most of us don't ever get rich and we damn sure don't change the world. We just make useless crap that makes rich dudes richer that will be utterly forgotten by history, and that's not worth giving up your youth and energy and life to.
I know most of y'all won't believe me. That's how this whole youth/middle age thing works, right? Stupid old man who never got successful grousing at the kids.
But man, I'd give anything to have not done most of the work I've ever done for other people, and spent that time wandering penniless around the world instead. Or had better luck early enough to make enough money to stop working a long time ago. But the key word there is "luck". That's almost always all it is.
Go home at 5, man. Trust me. The code and the capitalism will still be there in the morning, but that great meal, that night of partying, that mysterious stranger across the bar? They may not be.
Not once has my overtime paid off in any sense - not even been recognised, costing both my physical and mental health.
Never again.
> Not once has my overtime paid off in any sense - not even been recognised, costing both my physical and mental health.
I hard disagree. In an environment where the norm, and expectation is to leave on time, a _very rare_ overtime ask can make a significant difference. There's a difference between an occasional ask of overtime, and a culture of the team working 50+ hour weeks. In that world, the difference between a 50 hour and a 55 hour (i.e. 2 evenings of staying later than normal) is minimal, and doesn't pay off.
Some of my biggest successes in my career have been because of overtime, a very occasional weekend, but they are the absolute exception, not the norm.
While your point is valid, your opener could use some work.
Wasn't worth it.
If you read this fresh from graduation and you think people give you opportunities, and “chances” by working for free, or intern stuff, or low ball wages with the “promise” of upgrading… skip that stuff. To people just starting out and anyone : you are a business. More money needs to come in than energy wasted and going out. Your year ends balance should be positive, both monetary and energy wise. At the end of the year, not just 3 years into a startups future that might never arrive.
I worked for a new business once, and they whinged because "everyone else stays past 5:30 but you always leave on time". I just replied "it's not my business". They never said anything again.
However, that established clear boundaries. Once - and only once - I went in on a weekend for some out of hours work (a database migration or something), and in the following pay review they gave me a large raise specficially citing that I worked when they needed me. If I'd always provided free labour I doubt I'd have got the same raise.
The funny thing was, they asked me once what they could do to improve things and I suggested flexitime. They said they'd get back to me.
A few days later they came back and said, "we're going to be honest. Everyone else out there stays past 5:30 for nothing. We're not legally allowed to only give you flexitime, so we won't give it to anyone since they already work for free". Fair enough. My colleagues trying to earn brownie points screwed us all over by providing free work.
Boundaries are important. Don't let bosses treat you like a mug.
But even if I was offered paid overtime, and at a rate higher than my regular salary, I wouldn't work overtime. I'm in my mid-50's and Monday to Friday, 9am-5:30pm is enough time to spend doing work. I have hobbies and interests outside of work that are far more interesting.
Wait, what?? Every single of my employment contracts had a line like this, but I always assumed it was paid work. I can't imagine it meaning "from time to time you may be required to work additional hours for free". In fact all the contracts I remember that had this sentence also had an "overtime" section where there were things like:"if you work over 10h on a weekday every additional hour is at overtime pay rate of 1.5x, all hours worked on Saturday are at 1.5x rate, Sundays and Bank Holidays at double rate". That was pretty much standard in many companies I worked at. So not only the contract stated those additional hours were paid. They were worth more than the "normal time" beyond a certain amount of time worked per day.
In addition one company I worked at even had a section in there that if I work more than 24h straight there must be at least 24h of rest. If I work Sundays I have an option of taking Sunday double pay or having a weekday off no later than 14 days later if I want. Etc. Etc. Good companies exist. Anyone miserable in their work, please do look for a better place. Unfortunately many people just don't like changing jobs. My own sister was "stuck" in a miserable job for 5 years because I couldn't convince her to put real effort into looking for another one.
However, having said all that I have to say I had ocassional situations for various reasons when I didn't claim overtime. There are times one can benefit more by not asking for overtime.
For example I once had a job at a small family run business with a profit share bonus at the end of the year. That bonus was worth a lot more to me than throwing a wrench in the works by declining to work on some emergency in a middle of a night for sake of a few hours of overtime here and there. And during my time there the business went from employing 4 people in a basement to 30 people in a shiny new "office unit" in a business park. I had a big share in this success and I was compensated well there.
Then another job was in a large company that paid me more than double of what I made before as a normal daily rate. I think there was an office move on a weekend once when I never claimed overtime for because my request for an overtime form were met with silence. It was worth more to me to "give up that overtime" than raise stink for my manager risking my contract will not get renewed.
So my point is, you should decide if you want to be paid overtime. Is your free time worth double the money to you or is it unsellable? Perhaps you have family you prefer to spend time with? If you do, look for a job that treats you well.
That is why one of the worst things that can happen to an economy IMO is unemployment. I'll take inflation every day over unemployment. Sure inflation consumes your savings, but high rate of unemployment makes work miserable for everyone. I still remember when we used to have 20% unemployment in the 90s in Poland. Back them the power dynamic was such that when your boss asked you to work overtime you didn't even ask for an overtime form. You pretended to be glad the company offers you great opportunity to spend time with them on a weekend instead of being "bored at home". Seriously, I had colleagues say this to me with a straight face.
Then Covid came along in 2020 and my freelance work dried up. I reluctantly and fearfully started looking for full time work and was lucky to join a company that takes good care not to burn out their staff. Been here now for a decent amount of time and rarely work more than my contracted 37.5 hours a week, and it's fully remote.
> Don't be anybody's bitch. Don't chase after that carrot dangling from a stick in front of you forever.
This. I was made promises about being "looked after" by the last company, especially around the time it was up for sale. It was all bullshit.
In the end, work your contracted hours then go home/switch off. Don't let your life be held hostage by companies that expect you to burn both ends of the candle. Burn out is no fun.
What is rich? 100k? 5m? 100m? I know what your answer will be: "you decide what is rich". Well, maybe the people who work a lot want to be a lot more rich than you.
I doubt anyone will trade becoming rich for meeting mysterious strangers at bars and partying at night. Both these things involve drinking, and really it's just a drug out of misery.
Ultimately, your gripe is not that you worked a lot but just that you didn't make money out of it. Now, you are just fantasizing and romanticizing being penniless (without ever being in such a situation).
Life is for living. Whatever that means to you, not your boss.
Even when my boss is me, working out what life means is tough. It won't be found in toil for others.
But in terms of actual productivity, I observed lots of activity and little actual achievement. What buoyed their productivity was the technology of a freshly rebuilt economy and industry post-WW2, which, coupled with a few innovative ideas, gave Japanese industry a powerhouse advantage to the point that it almost didn't matter what the workers did. They could have worked 2 hours a day and still had the same output (not the factory line workers, of course).
When the economy went sour in the 90s, there was no change in work ethic; people still worked late into the night, and still had the same levels of activity with the same levels of achievement, but the technological industrial advantage had dissipated over the years and they were no longer competitive. Same input, less output.
Long hours work against you. We've studied this to death, and the results are clear.
Japanese lack of productivity stems from a lot of hard-headedness from their management. Anything that disrupts this is welcome in my book
Despite the fact this is actually illegal in the "host country" they still did it with no overtime paid(or claimed) . I had many Japanese friends in this company over the years and I knew they would much prefer to be off at 5pm as we were, but every time we talked about it it turned out they are 100% powerless to change it. The company not only provides a prestigious job (which was extremely important), but also provided housing in the host country, a visa, good schools for the kids etc. Additionally, every time we discussed it I got an impression they really have it easy here in comparison to how much they would have to work back in Japan. So all those people really didn't want to be sent back.
On the rare occasion when I had to work on a weekend and overnight, HR contacted me asking me to fill the overtime form :-o
I write this not as a complaint. I considered it one of my best jobs and if not that I wanted to be in a different role I would still be there, but even now years later I still remember having this weird feeling of there being a very real discrimination against other people on the basis of culture and not being able to do anything about it.
The time was paid, though. It wasn’t “time and a half,” like in the US, but people were paid for the time.
Managers weren’t paid for extra hours, but engineers were.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/plaza-accord.asp
If we take this statement in the link:
> the intention of the Plaza Accord was to correct trade imbalances between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Japan
Then:
a) Why were Britain and France interested and why are they completely omitted from the article?
b) Why didn't Germany end up in the mire like Japan?
It seems to me that Japan's officials agreed to something that either didn't suit its economy or the management of its economy was subsequently mishandled (not hard to believe given the ~25 years of finance scandals that are linked to the heart of government[1] - it's not hard to imagine things weren't any better in the preceding 15). As such, I'd also be very interested to know what OP was referring to because I'd find it hard to believe if it was the Plaza Accord.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/17/business/international-bu...
https://youtu.be/JQNyzbMTEQY
Apparently overtime is... included in advance taking the average for the company, so people feel obliged to do it since technically they already got paid.
It's basically like that team-building exercise with a dozen people trying to move a broomstick down when each person is holding it with one finger. The default reaction is to send it flying.
In any case 40% of Japanese workers are part-time - I've met one - she lived in Italy and her line of work was writing articles about life there and she couldn't pick up more hours even if she wanted to. She said it was increasingly common for people to be employed like that.
It's actually 45% of Japanese women workers. The percentage of men being part time is much lower around 12%. A big reason why your friend struggles finding anything else is that she's a woman and that Japan is an intensely sexist society.
While I get what you are trying to say, but this is not always true. There have been times where I pulled up all nighter and produced good work, specially during college or some project I am deeply invested in. But similar thing can't be achieved in a big org though. If I am expected to work for more than 5-6 hours a day to meet deadline in the office, the quality of work invariably declines.
John Carmack also defended working long hours, and admittedly he is one of the most productive developer.
“We have an emergency, the service is screwed, we really need it not to be”
“We have to deliver by the end of the week but we haven’t finished testing everything, we need some extra effort for the next couple of days to fix and validate as things come up”
These can work, in my experience, but it can’t become routine and you have to be prepared for a higher than average error rate from your people.
Exactly this. From first hand experience, when forced to deliver under time pressure, I cut corners.
This means, I might be able to deliver the feature. But the tradeoff is it adds technical debt and physical stress, which needs to be dealt with afterwards.
Furthermore, if you have a family, it also takes a toll on family life.
This regularily got me into fights with other execs and CEO who said "Stephan, when I go through technology at 8pm there is no one there, don't we know we're a startup?"
When a friend and I was on business in Japan we wanted to meet someone at 11pm at night. We were waiting in the business complex and lots and lots of people were leaving at that time (11pm!), then we got a call he could not leave. What a sad working culture.
Make that more like 5 weeks. The legal minimum here in the UK is 33 days (well, it might be 34 next year but we'll see), which is 5.5 weeks. Every job I've had as a professional has had more leave than that, usually 38-40 days (7.5-8 weeks), and in the last 3-4 years I've also had a weeks office closure during the summer. The feeling of taking a weeks break and coming back and you _not_ having to catch up on what's changed since you left is incredible.
Do you think this is a carryover from the 1980s, when Japan was a world-leader in semiconductors and personal electronics? Is the thinking that this culture was the reason? And an attempt to return to the glory days?
Or is it more of a social thing? With peer pressure?
As in someone at director level or even HR would come down on the _manager_ for allowing this. The view is either the employee is under delivering or the team is under resourced and in both cases it's a _manager_ problem to be solved.
This is something I never understood in US companies, I mean considering all the concerns with liability and lawsuits everyone seems pretty chilled about squeezing 20 hour days from employees.
At least for men, I feel we need to distance ourselfes from the paradigm of being valued only as disposable providers.
I find there's like 4 good hours in the day for actual valuable creative work. The rest can be useful for grunt work, but there's rarely so much critical grunt work that one should exhaust themselves.
Before you ask your employees to do overtime you should find out what their typical day looks like. I have mostly worked for startups during my career, and all the wasted time and interruptions still blow my mind.
To make an analogy, it's like releasing a game with average graphics that a powerful GPU struggles to render, and blaming GPUs for low FPS instead of your poor software. You should optimize your game before you ask players to overclock their cards.
Yes I did some long days occasionally but I did them because I felt it was needed and because it fit my personal life on that day. Not because someone told me it was needed.
Beyond that and it's indicative of a failure of planning, to which my response is "Do not attempt to make your failure of planning my problem."
4.30 is my normal leave time now without kids though (8-4.30 with a half hour unpaid lunch break is my schedule for 40h/week).
Kids sports practice etc regularly starts at 5PM or even 4PM. Being a parent is just fundamentally incompatible with working past 6PM, at least where I live.
If someone else doesn't understand the boundaries between work and personal life, and tops it off with trying to guilt trip you, then that is on them and whatever corporate/VC kool-aid they are drinking.
You can only wish that this is something they will come to realize (hopefully not too late in their life to avoid unnecessary regret).
I don't believe in overworking, I believe in steering the work in the wrong direction. Staying at your desk just to attend a meeting, working without feeling like you are contributing much, these things are productivity killers, not the other way around IMHO
Does it mean Nat thinks that not having crunch time at Xamarin was a mistake?
(Maybe they each need to resurrect the apology cards!)
I doubt he can offer rational and impartial arguments.
The times I worked past my hours were for team dinners/events, problems that piqued my curiosity, and large launches/conferences. All which had me in a bed at a reasonable time.
https://jondouglas.dev/remote-first/
I don't know if you can make a more obvious example as to why the elite needs to hang.
But it's meant as positive. "Only until 5pm!". Rush hour in my city on Fridays is like at 14 (2pm). Work 37.5h weeks, but how I spend those hours are mostly up to me as long as I partake in meetings scheduled between 9 and 15.
But it makes me furious when those same people want to know why the rank and file aren’t as “dedicated” as they are.
CTO has 30% of the equity. The ‘founding engineer’ they hired has 1.5%. The next few engineers they hired have 0.5%. Pretty obvious why one of those people is OK to sleep at the office and the others have better shit to do!
it just makes logical sense. If you want more productivity, have two shifts.
but at some point people become anti-productive. that takes many forms, some in terms of mistakes that cost time, accidents, or just faffing about and not actually doing work