<story><title>The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/16/sane-workweek/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patrickdavey</author><text>I went to a talk once on leadership. One of the suggestions was to get your &amp;quot;go to hell kit&amp;quot; ready. That is, get enough money in the bank (whatever that means for you) so that you can walk away if things cross your personal lines, be they moral &amp;#x2F; work-life balance, whatever. It&amp;#x27;s a good thing if there&amp;#x27;s pressure to work silly hours. In my first job (recent grad) before I left the job, I&amp;#x27;d been working 5 weekends straight (at least a Sat&amp;#x2F;Sun). Looking back, insane, now I&amp;#x27;d be having a conversation with my manager.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it&amp;#x27;s hard when the &amp;quot;norm&amp;quot; is to work these extra hours. Where I live now, I have worked a normal 8:45ish to 5:15ish and haven&amp;#x27;t had to stay late or work weekends in years.  It can be like that, I reckon it _ought_ to be like that. If your contract says 40 hours a week, why would you work more? You&amp;#x27;re just reducing your hourly rate. Now, I don&amp;#x27;t mind putting in extra effort if needed, no worries, but if it&amp;#x27;s the culture that it&amp;#x27;s just long hours, well that&amp;#x27;s crazy.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/16/sane-workweek/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s the perfect amount of work every week, but I&amp;#x27;m sure anything &amp;gt; 40h is wrong, and you should add commute time if more than 30min&amp;#x2F;day, otherwise it&amp;#x27;s a fake figure. In 36-40h&amp;#x2F;week it&amp;#x27;s possible to do a lot of things. If you can&amp;#x27;t often is not because of the time, but because the same people wanting you to work more vaporize your time with meetings, conference calls, emails, phone calls, at a rate that makes it impossible for you to work. Or your coworkers are tempesting you with questions. Or your boss is switching your goal every day not allowing you to produce properly. Or you lack discipline to sit down and work instead of surfing random websites. Anyway whatever the problem is, the solution is NEVER to work more than 40h. Working more can just lead to a shitty life, depression, burn-out, and so forth.</text></comment>