<story><title>More bosses give four-day workweek a try</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/807133509/enjoy-the-extra-day-off-more-bosses-give-4-day-workweek-a-try</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>I think economically it may make sense to hire fresh people for less money, burn them out and then have them leave soon. This may be one reason for ageism   .</text></item><item><author>andrekandre</author><text>&amp;gt; I had a manager at a startup tell me that conventional management assumes that engineers will only stay at a company for 18 months, so they really pile on the stress&lt;p&gt;which is ironic, because isn’t that why people stay less and less longer at a company (can’t stand the slog)?</text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I was a development manager for years, for a Japanese company.&lt;p&gt;The Japanese are type A++ (at least, in Tokyo). They are masters at applying stress across the Pacific.&lt;p&gt;As a manager, it was my job to insulate my team from the stress, and I often took the hit for telling my bosses that I wasn&amp;#x27;t going to push my people harder than they already were working.&lt;p&gt;It seemed to work out in the end. When they finally rolled up my team, I had been managing it for 25 years, and the person with the least seniority in my team had a decade with the company.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a whole different world, out there, now. I had a manager at a startup tell me that conventional management assumes that engineers will only stay at a company for 18 months, so they really pile on the stress.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t even imagine that. There were a lot of downsides to working with the corporation that I worked for, but they treated us all with a great deal of respect, and made it possible for me to keep valuable, senior-level C++ developers for decades; despite rather sub-optimal pay, and a not-so-thrilling work environment.</text></item><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>It seems a lot of these experiments are a success. But after a while somebody gets greedy and thinks “we get good productivity at 32 hours. I wonder how much more we could get at 40 hours?”  And soon you are back at the old schedule.&lt;p&gt;Something similar happened  at my company. For once a project was ahead  of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again.&lt;p&gt;For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>That may be why there is so much emphasis placed on dev frameworks like React, because you can get JS programmers right out of BootCamp onboarded fairly quickly (and cheaply).&lt;p&gt;Also, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on process. If you will have new people taking over the code all the time, you should have a fairly strict requirement for patterns like MVVM and VIPER, and require new hires to be able to adapt to these quickly.&lt;p&gt;The Japanese had a similar structure, because they rotate engineers around every couple of years. The engineers stay with the company forever, but they change jobs frequently.&lt;p&gt;That means that it&amp;#x27;s very important to have a strict policy of heavily-documented, inflexible process, and you can have vast legacy codebases that people are afraid to change. If you can farm a lot of that out to a dependency framework, then it becomes S.E.P. (Somebody Else&amp;#x27;s Problem).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not a huge fan of this approach, but many companies seem to feel it works.&lt;p&gt;There was a company called Taligent that took this to extremes. I read their style guide (I spent a great deal of time researching how other people did development -it made me quite the cynic). They had the strictest, most convoluted structure I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered.&lt;p&gt;Taligent eventually collapsed under its own weight. The idea was to only have Architects be creative, making line programmers little more than data entry. Programmers couldn&amp;#x27;t do stuff like create new classes without getting permission from an Architect.</text></comment>
<story><title>More bosses give four-day workweek a try</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/807133509/enjoy-the-extra-day-off-more-bosses-give-4-day-workweek-a-try</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>I think economically it may make sense to hire fresh people for less money, burn them out and then have them leave soon. This may be one reason for ageism   .</text></item><item><author>andrekandre</author><text>&amp;gt; I had a manager at a startup tell me that conventional management assumes that engineers will only stay at a company for 18 months, so they really pile on the stress&lt;p&gt;which is ironic, because isn’t that why people stay less and less longer at a company (can’t stand the slog)?</text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I was a development manager for years, for a Japanese company.&lt;p&gt;The Japanese are type A++ (at least, in Tokyo). They are masters at applying stress across the Pacific.&lt;p&gt;As a manager, it was my job to insulate my team from the stress, and I often took the hit for telling my bosses that I wasn&amp;#x27;t going to push my people harder than they already were working.&lt;p&gt;It seemed to work out in the end. When they finally rolled up my team, I had been managing it for 25 years, and the person with the least seniority in my team had a decade with the company.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a whole different world, out there, now. I had a manager at a startup tell me that conventional management assumes that engineers will only stay at a company for 18 months, so they really pile on the stress.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t even imagine that. There were a lot of downsides to working with the corporation that I worked for, but they treated us all with a great deal of respect, and made it possible for me to keep valuable, senior-level C++ developers for decades; despite rather sub-optimal pay, and a not-so-thrilling work environment.</text></item><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>It seems a lot of these experiments are a success. But after a while somebody gets greedy and thinks “we get good productivity at 32 hours. I wonder how much more we could get at 40 hours?”  And soon you are back at the old schedule.&lt;p&gt;Something similar happened  at my company. For once a project was ahead  of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again.&lt;p&gt;For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OccamsMirror</author><text>Absolute bullshit, but the metrics being gathered are all askew. When you&amp;#x27;ve already fucked your productivity with bad management, what difference does a high turnover rate have?</text></comment>