We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team (made by the team over several iterations to make it not burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the downtime category (only during work hours of course).
Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..
We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.
If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.
If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.
His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.
In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.
Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.
If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.
There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.
It's been a minute since I read this study, and I didn't take perfect notes, but iirc, the top line result is that (among munition workers) productivity per hour peaks below 40 hours a week, but total productivity peaks above it.
Nothing very automated I am afraid, but we had enough people who cared to do the admin work to make the figures reliable.
We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.
We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..
One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.
Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.
We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.
We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..
It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!
Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that.
Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.
My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.
All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.
DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.
> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.
> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.
Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.
Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team
I agree. And I tried it too. In the end I couldn’t find anything else to do in my downtime. So I went home at 5 and worked from there. Got up early and worked before coming in. I work from home now so the above is moot now.
80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.
I would not call it trivial, but I found that, as a manager, you often have to be a psychologist and spend very large amounts of your time listening to the more personal issues of your colleagues. When I was manager over 400 people (there were managers between me and them but I was ‘the top level’), I spent 80+ hours a week doing my work; 60+ was easily absorbed by motivating people and listening to their stories about imminent divorces, dying parents, spouses or kids, and so on. Then 20 or so hours to do my actual work. It is not for me… I do not want such a position again.
I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.
it doesnt matter if the work is trivial, youre still working. if im dealing with slack pings at 9pm, thats work, even if they just need a thumbs up.
> six days a week.
Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse
Why do it though? You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate. There are plenty of companies where 40 hours of effective work is a top performer and things aren’t breaking every week
> You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate.
Agreed.
> Why do it though?
It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.
It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.
Sometimes it's easier to code all day long than how easy it feels to improve your life. Especially if one excels at work and lacks a social network in life.
> End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.
There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."
Also to do more structured based social activities.
If it’s so painful to hang out then you could do something else. Go for a run/bike/hike, woodworking, gardening, gym, learn a new skill, etc. heck so drugs and play video games. It’s good to have something other than work in your life or one day you’ll have a crisis when things go poorly with work
Thanks for sharing. I am probably in the same boat. I feel miserable when not working. I managed to improve my situation though
- 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously.
- Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored.
- Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking.
To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy. People give me strange look when I work because I love going fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.
Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I like playing golf, but I can’t obsess about getting my handicap down. I also can’t obsess about a hobby project. I can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for long hours.
I think for a very short period that it can work, such as a critical deadline. We’ve all been there, adrenaline flowing, target hit, etc. but if that is normalized then no it will kill you in the end.
Your question is "Is it ok?" rather than "Is it legal?".
Assuming you have checked the legality of this hiring criteria in your country/state...
I think it is ok, I live in a country with very little regulation, by choice mainly.
I think it is ok because your job ad will be up front and honest. If you provide context (e.g. you are hiring for sensitive counseling position dealing with specific issues), you can speed up the hiring process.
If you provide no context, a good assumption is that your company has some sort of bias, and potential applicants can speed up their job search by skipping yours. It's a time waster to find out about that bias during the interview process, or worse, during your employment.
I agree it is a steep learning curve coming from docker only. But if you have to scale your app or other resources quickly and easily, I think k8s is the best of the bunch. I have found other solutions more difficult (docker swarm, paas platforms like heroku, a custom nginx and a lot of docker hosts etc..).
If you don't need that easy scaling, then I don't think there is a need for k8s.
As soon as we brought our redis and mongo in house, k8s became easier and cheaper than heroku (and 2 other PAAS solutions that we had experimented with).
After the switch (and a single open source tool) we still didn't need any specialized devops knowledge, we just have developers in house.
> "you will not, in general, see that error at creation time. "
I agree, this was daunting for me too.
I use werf.io now (an opensource project which I am not affiliated with, I am just a user). It deploys my resources and waits to validate whether the deploy succeeded. They call it "giterminism".
You can do this yourself with scripts for sure, but I have not needed to extend any of their built in functionality yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men