Every year, we do an employee survey to see how management is doing; like a report card for management. In the last 3 years, mine has come back with the highest company scores for employee engagement, job satisfaction, and project completion rate. I was asked to give a presentation to the other officers and managers about things I do to get those scores.
The presentation was basically one slide that I expanded to 10. It came down to creating the expectation, for the folks who report to me, that a work week is 37.5 hours (our full-time week) and no more. I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I’ve failed. If that happens, together we look at their project commitments and reduce the workload, or get training, or whatever is needed.
Working folks to the point of burnout is NEVER a valid solution. Respecting personal time pays dividends to everyone. It’s amazing how treating people like adults makes them happier and more productive. It’s such a low bar and yet seems so foreign to people.
After my presentation, multiple execs argued thar I’d get more done if I pushed my team harder. Our company President pulled up all of our project completion rates, and asked them to explain the discrepancy. The three who complained the most about my approach were in the bottom five.
Data continually shows people are happy when they have a solid, predictable, work life balance. Happy people are more productive and are willing to do more in the long run. And they stick around, so you don’t have to keep looking for new employees. Everyone wins. Yet, there is such a resistance to it by certain people, and I don’t understand why.
Tldr: Expecting your people to give up their personal life for work, it’s a clear sign that you are a terrible leader.
Yet, there is such a resistance to it by certain people, and I don’t understand why.
People are emotional driven. It might be something like “I worked 80 hour weeks. If I accept that that wasn’t the right move, then I have to admit I fucked up. I’m a good smart person. I don’t fuck up. Thus, this idea is wrong and I reject it”
sounds like how my parents rationalize my childhood
It’s how religious and cult members stay in and why it’s so hard to deprogram them.
Drama is much more compelling than good leadership. Martin Gutmann: good leadership is boring
shit floats
Consult your doctor
he said to cut all ceos out of my diet
Hmm… maybe it we make them into hot dogs first they’ll be more digestible.
It’s more cognitive dissonance than emotional drivers, with what you’ve described.
Is cognitive dissonance not a subcategory of emotions? If not I guess you’re right
No, it’s where your reality externally doesn’t match your internal idea of it so you ignore it away or rationalize it away, etc.
I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I’ve failed.
Bingo!
This was my attitude too. If anyone has to work late or weekends, it was a failure in resource allocation, which is a management function.
The only exception was if people had to get on late night calls with people in other timezones, in which case they were expected to take the equivalent time off at their own convenience.
Another easy win is bullshit agile daily standups. I made them twice a week, and no longer than 15 minutes and only to cover potential blockers, not status reports. That alone made everyone happier. In one case, the team finished a project that had been languishing for three years in three months and shipped it out.
It’s really about respecting people’s time.
My last boss totally fucked up my daily stand-ups. I suggested them because, when I started, I found most work wasn’t consistently tracked or even discussed. My boss’s management style was panicking about everything and panic working while raging that no one else was also panicking about everything (spoiler: I also learned department turnover was high, can’t imagine why), so I was trying to help implement any organization whatsoever. She quickly turned my 10 minute stand-ups into 1-1.5 hour slogs where each team member had to give an update on each of their projects, despite having earlier logged it all into the project tracker I created.
By far the worst micromanager and least competent person I ever worked for.
I dont understand how these managers get hired and stay on so long behaving that way
My promotion was fucked by an internal client like this, who’s a manager that keeps failing upwards and sideways. His team members hate him, his VP doesn’t trust him and keeps putting additional managers on his project.
My team did everything - we saved his project from the edge of the cliff, reached milestones, onboarded contractors, and made the notoriously grumpy VP satisfied.
Yet that’s not enough, as I’m supposed to make this manchild happy.
Some people just love drama and panic, and others are too soft to push back on them, as they are uncomfortable with any type of conflict.
True, although for some the conflict simply isn’t worth it.
My coworkers and I were having issues getting any information from another team to do our job. Since we had a set deadline to finish the work, I set up a Monday/Wednesday meeting schedule to extract the information we needed from that team. My boss and the other team’s boss turned it into a two hour update-fest with us and the other team updating our respective bosses, with both teams in the meeting. So fucking pointless, and so far away from what that meeting was supposed to be, it is truly astonishing we were able to get anything done.
Oh and the other team stopped providing the information we needed to finish when our bosses converted our meeting to update-fest.
People requesting you to say orally the same thing you typed in the task tracker that they should see if they paid attention to the tasks that are assigned to them and also notifies them by email really annoys me.
The frequency of standups should be determined by the team and blockers should never have to wait till standup to be surfaced.
I work on a growth product team and we frequently have devs pulled away to work on a feature in a different product. The engineers started losing track of availability of others and what features were going to prod became opaque. We opted to move back to daily standups with status reports as it kept the team informed and thus motivated, and gave an opportunity in several cases to refine approaches from the start.
There are, of course, other ways to accomplish this, like having a public issue board, but often private conversations don’t make it to the issues.
Semi-agreed on daily standups – the regular accountability drives productivity for a lot of people, but I also agree that daily is excessive. We’ve settled on 3 days/week and it works pretty well for both camps - 2 is probably fine, but 1 I would argue is missing the point.
Def agreed on 15 minutes, as you say - any longer and you lose both people and the purpose of the check-in.
Flip daily around and it becomes much more useful.
Instead of everyone reporting what they did, go through the board and look at tickets, with a focus on tickets in hand-over states (waiting for review, waiting for tests, …). That way the daily can actually help progress stuck tickets.
At the end, ask if anyone doesn’t have enough work and needs new tickets (to catch the potential problem of running out of work).
Doesn’t take more than a few minutes and focusses on the things where the daily can actually help, instead of turning it into the daily exercise of “Yesterday I had a ton of meetings. Today I’ll have a ton of meetings. Bye.” That kind of stuff is worthless.
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You’re an electromagnet?
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This is why I didn’t stay in management. I had the same attitude as you. I didn’t mind working late myself and if someone really wanted to because they had an interesting problem I’d usually let them cut out early Friday or come in late the next day. I got too much shit from other management and C levels about how my team never seemed to be around. I’d ask what was not getting done or what they were expecting that they didn’t get. The answer was always just that they didn’t see the team in the office when other teams were still there. They could have needed something!
I got tired of that shit. One of the reasons that I went into business for myself as a one man company. Now I don’t have to justify anything but my own existence to anyone except who I directly report to. And the guy I directly report to likes the big ass penalty clause in my contract for terminating it early or without notice because accounting can’t get rid of me without taking a hit or giving me time to finish up my projects. I’m judged solely on what I deliver. And I almost always come in ahead of time and with better results than most other teams because I’m not worked like a rented mule.
Yup. We’re humans and when we get tired we make mistakes. I could work a 12 hour day, but in the twelfth hour I’ll probably make a mistake that’ll take more than 6 hours or to fix someday in the future. If I work 8 hours you get 8 hours of productivity. If I work 12 hours you’ll end up getting 6 hours or less of productivity.
The whole thing about making people work long hours is just about bad managers that enjoy exerting power over people. It’s not about productivity.
We’re humans and when we get tired we make mistakes. I could work a 12 hour day, but in the twelfth hour I’ll probably make a mistake that’ll take more than 6 hours or to fix someday in the future
Doctors/nurses/cops/emts/firefighters/pipefitters/welders/fucktard-managers everywhere are gasping in shock and horror.
Just because they work it doesn’t make it right.
Not saying it is. Though I do know from the medical field especially that where mistakes are found is in the handoff or shift change, which is one reason it took so long to see any meaningful change in the way residency worked for doctors. Despite the incredibly long hours, the new docs didn’t tend to make mistakes in care during the shift. I think long shifts aren’t necessarily the problem, it’s when we’re pushed to keep working when we can actually feel the fatigue and malaise of the day set in. Maybe the only way (right now, due to the way you work or you die) is to mandate shorter shifts, but I would love to see a culture set up where you work until you start to feel it, and then go home or take a break, however long that break needs to be. That’s probably fantasy of the highest order, but hey, why not imagine ways where things could like that and push for them?
Medical work and software development are very different kinds of work with very different difficulties.
A lot of medical shift work is about being there, not necessarily about doing stuff all the time. There’s a lot of standby-duty. It’s sometimes physical work, sometimes emotional/social work, sometimes actual brain work (researching stuff). It’s quite a lot of different types of tasks over a shift.
Software develompent is highly-concentrated brain work without meaningful built-in breaks. You spend all day staring at a screen, doing high-level logic non-stop. Humans aren’t built for that kind of work at all, so it’s really difficult to do that for extended periods.
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A lot of business types have a very simple view on labor. Time is money, so the more time you get somebody to work the more you earn. Of course it doesn’t work like that in reality, but this mentality is spread far and wide.
The suffering is the point
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What did the execs have to say after being asked to explain the discrepancy?
Sounds exploitative because it is. Just because work is your entire personality doesn’t mean every one else’s should be too. Fucking tool
Recently read “Pimp” by Iceberg Slim, and it seems like a training manual for (some) modern managers and executives. Use your recruiting process to select low-esteem, easily manipulated people to be your worker drones, and they will do 80 hour weeks to earn that pizza party.
who deeply believe in the mission (and the future value of their equity)
This is the only proviso for me. Some people wouldn’t mind working themselves to exhaustion for a lot of money. Then the question of whether it’s exploitative or not depends on the amounts involved and the conditions of equity ownership
Dude, you’re pulling 80 hour weeks for your company. That you own. Expecting the same input from people who will never see as much as a percentage of what you stand to make off of their success is delusional. But I suppose delusion is almost a requirement for these kind of people.
Personally theory…
Many startups fail because people try to work 80+hrs per week. Biologically more than about 25-30 hours of work is usually a waste of time. You can occasionally pull a long week but then you need to rest and recover to get back to full productivity. If you push beyond it often, you’ll make a shit ton of stupid mistakes that completely nullify all your efforts.
If you’ve ever been around someone “working” on hour 70+ during a week you’ll know what I mean. A five minute tasks takes them an hour and they generally fuck it up.
I’ve worked for a few startups (in software). They all failed because their idea was stupid, the executives were technically incompetent borderline sociopaths, and they weren’t even good at getting VCs to throw money at them. Some employees worked insane hours while others of us fucked off most of the time and came to work high - it made no difference.
The vast majority of people who start at the beginning of a startup will receive equity, so they are also co-owners.
Maybe for employees like 1-5. Beyond that is rapidly diminishing amounts of equity. I was employee #49 and got like 40,000
sharesoptions (that I had to buy)And even if you are like employee #3, the actual owner and investors get more than you
Exactly, there is a place in the world for startups burning 80 hr/wk. Just compensate the people who are doing that adequately with equity, and hire risk takers who want that kind of risk.
I agree in principle that start up employees can be incentivized better than the usual wage or salary slave.
There is always a big butt, though.
Non-capital investors almost always get shares of a lower class that can be denied a share of any future revenue from a sale of the company or god forbid they get real revenue.
These term “Hollywood accounting” exists for a reason and skepticism about the real value of lower class shares is very valid.
Exactly!! Easy to pull so many hours when it is for your own business. But do not expect employees who could get fired or laid off any time at your own will to have the same commitment.
Yeah, 100%. This kind of advice can maybe make sense if you’re starting a startup, but everyone employed at that stage needs to be on equal ground and well-protected. If they’re not, then that can still be fine, but they can’t be expected to put as much of their lives into your product. They’re contractors you’re hiring for some shit-shoveling and maybe it’s best to be honest about that.
The unfortunate thing in tech is that, due to pushing “learning to code” as a universal employment option, there’s always a pool of idealistic fresh blood that is willing to crunch for you if you make vague mention of being in it together, when a few people stand to gain the vast majority of the profit if the company’s product is successful. By the time the new recruits are old and bitter and burnt out, you can lay em off for poor performance (or cannibalize the company at large) and hire some more doe-eyed interns.
If you’re expecting your employees to consistently work long hours for you, they need to have the same stake as you do. They need flexibility to take care of their mental and physical health as needed. You should encourage them to unionize and collectively bargain for their needs once they come in conflict with yours, because they absolutely will. You can’t afford to lose these people, because it’s rare to find people that won’t get ground into dust doing this because they want it as bad as you. so make it sustainable and more than worth their while. if you can’t find these people? maybe your app sucks.
these types view themselves as above the labor they’re hiring because they got there first / had the means to form a company and I fucking hate it.
Depends how much equity they give their employees
I think what he said about startups is more pr less true. Of course, with startups you’re putting in a lot of work to break into or create a new market, and you get a percentage of that company, too. It certainly isn’t for everyone, and most people don’t want to do it for their whole career. And expecting that kind of attitude from a regular employee is simply ridiculous.
“I work 80 hrs for my own business and I expect everyone else to do so…on a regular salary”
CEOs think their time at restaurants count as working hours
They think that responding to emails every now and then is “working”…
I’d only be willing to put in long hours for little pay at a startup if they agreed to give me shares in the company when I left.
Yeah they talk about equity but were they offering it to this position?
Also, fuck that dude regardless.
I worked at a startup for a couple of years in the '90s. The equity was “we’ll take care of you”. Spoiler: they did not take care of me.
That’s literally not equity (which I think is your point).
That was literally my point.
If you work 80+h and it doesn’t feel like work, then maybe playing golf and eating out doesn’t magically turn into work just because you write it off as work expenses.
“No no, you don’t understand. You shouldn’t have a family, you have to flog yourself to death for this startup company that’s making a Gym Membership app. If you don’t neglect your kids to vibe code a scheduling system then you just don’t deserve a job and you and your family should just die”
Bro, if you don’t believe in GimLyfe, maybe success isn’t for you.
You should really consider having the grindset to be a self-starter in our face-paced family, instead of having a real family.
Some of you will die but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Massive impact on the world. Lol. Says the guy who makes another SaaS bs solution.
I feel like anyone who says they love their work so much it doesn’t feel like work just doesn’t have an actual life that they like to live so work just beats out not working everytime.
I mean there is people who work for organizations like Doctors without Borders. Being deployed in a zone of natural disaster or war, they probably rack up 60+ hours a week easily. However their pay is much smaller than what they could get in the “market”. Turns out people can love their job, if it does something meaningful, rather than make some rich people more rich.
they also aren’t doing any actual proper labor, just at the 19th hole having a “business lunch” with a “possible investor”
or “securing partnerships” by spending 2 days travelling for a 3 hour meeting
Does golf actually have more than 18 holes, or is this a sex joke?
Be kind: I don’t know golf…or jokes.
The 19th hole is the traditional joke name for the bar/restaurant that you go to after you finish playing. Not sure where you got sex from, but no, there is no sex involved in golf.
Oh that makes sense, thanks!
It’s the internet; it’s pretty safe to assume sex (or sex jokes), especially when holes are mentioned.
there is no sex involved in golf
Rule 34 says otherwise
I love my work, and at times I work long hours, nights, weekends, to meet specific goals or when there is an emeegency.
That is however the exception, not the rule.
I need my day to day to be smooth, I need my blend of work from home, so that when the high energy bursts do happen, I can handle it.
The idea of working at crisis levels all the time as standard is just insane to me, and suggests bad time management and expecations.
I can see a young bachelor with no hobbies choosing that but if you have a family and do this then you might as well just say that avoiding them is your only hobby.
na, they’re just lying. people at the top work far less than anyone else.
Their work is primarily flogging the slaves to work harder.
I really enjoy my job. I spend my time solving problems and work on projects that improve the water supply for the country. I enjoy working late because I don’t have any meetings, so I am unburdened enough to actually work. I don’t think I could work more than 50 hours a week though.
People who say that have ‘jobs’ where they blather and other people do work then money comes in.
I think there are people who love their job me included. The clients and co workers make it a bad experience.
I fucking love not working! I prioritize time spent not working over time working every day of my life.
sits back and waits for people to insinuate about my work quality
Exactly. Not a life worth having.
I mean, the douchebag CEO isn’t exactly wrong.
I myself very much want a good work-life balance, therefore I do not apply for jobs to be one of the first ten people working for a CEO that thinks they’re going to change the world.
He did a big favor for that candidate by not hitting him.
looking at the douchebags profile he’s also a, surprise surprise, massive advocate for AI with a recent post stating that gpt5 is a “massive change for humanity”
He has the usual tech bro posts with the usual bootlicker middle managers commenting support. Christ on a cracker I wish I could close my linkedin account.
These kind of guys are all so similar you could literally replace them and their posts with an AI.
Super pick me for a techno fascist world
they use it to write text. usually more text than any human would use. they get mad if you ask how much they spent on the slop picture they just posted.
Well considering when you want to make a post on Linkedin the site gives you the option to instead write it with AI. I imagine most of them do.
Throwing all techbros in the middle of the desert would do wonders for humanity
This is why it’s important to be honest about your deal breakers from the employee perspective or at least subtly figure out their plan for employees at startups. I learned this the hard way recently by basically wasting 6 months at a startup, went well for a while, then 60-70+ hour work weeks, then my boss became overbearing.
They weren’t honest from their side in the interview for most employees when they would ask about work life balance, the company always said it was great and well above average for the industry and startup environment.
Sad that they haven’t found a life that they truly love…
BRO IF YOU JUST GRIND! WIPES TEARS JUST FIND A PURPOSE, BRO. SOBS WORK 190 HOURS A WEEK BRO. IT’S LIKE THE DREAM. GRIND BRO. THE VISION. PUTS THE BARREL IN HIS MOUTH
If that vision was at least their own vision, but so many wage slaves freely give their life away for someone else’s. So many management positions that don’t get overtime but do 12h days because “otherwise things don’t work”. Well, they’re not supposed to work if that’s what it takes. Many of my colleagues are so close to burning out, or rather already sizzling.
I spent 24 years busting my ass so someone could go on RV trips every other week.
I’m out. If I do nothing for the rest of my life I’m good with it.
It’s because they’re still trying to fit their Proletariat ass into a Capitalist shaped hole.
Wonder how many people on their deathbed go “I REALLY wish I put 100+ hour weeks into muh StArTuP rather than just 80! Agggghhhh…”
Begin banana metaphor.
Bananas are great. If I ate a healthy amount of bananas a week, I’d be happy with my banana consumption. I’d enjoy bananas.
However, if I ate a lot of bananas each week, let’s say 80 🍌/week (that’s 16 bananas a day, from Monday to Friday!), I would HATE bananas, regardless of how much I previously enjoyed them. With so many bananas a week, I’d probably suffer from malnutrition and related health problems.
End banana metaphor.
I don’t think it’s possible to be happy when working 80+ hours a week, even if it’s something you used to enjoy. “The dose makes the poison.”
Exactly, loving your job doesn’t prevent burnout. No matter how much you love it, if you are doing actual work (not some exec shitposting on linkedin all day) then past a certain point your body/mind will just get too tired to function well.
I genuinely love my job. I would do it for free if I could afford to. I sometimes (especially lately) work well over 60 hours a week. But I need to be careful about how much OT I let myself put in because I will burn out. I know that when I push myself too hard I will eventually start fucking up. I will start missing obvious things. I will start making stupid mistakes. With my job I am also far more likely to seriously injure myself when burned out. Allowing myself to become burned out results in worse outcomes for the customers and costs my company more money. Not to mention that if I did injure myself badly enough to be out of work then all those extra hours I put in would be outweighed be the time I miss.
A good manager recognizes that a burned out employee does more harm than good and works to prevent it. A good manager knows that keeping their employees happy, well rested, and fulfilled is in the company’s best interest. Sometimes demands pop up that will require a bit of burn out to deal with but the benefit of meeting those demands needs to be weighed against the harm of that burnout. Shitty managers always severely underestimate the harm burnout causes not just to their employees but also to the company.
I don’t think it’s possible to be happy when working 80+ hours a week
I think there’s a certain element of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” in this.
If you’re really deeply invested in a project and doing it brings you joy, then you very well might find yourself investing every waking moment working on it.
But that’s not a “job”, that’s a “passion”. You typically don’t get to pursue your passions unless you already have a big passive income or a sugar daddy willing to cover your expenses.
