<story><title>Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-software-engineer/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aetherson</author><text>Yeah, I&amp;#x27;d like to see some actual data.  Some kind of scientific study, anything.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t say this because I&amp;#x27;m a proponent of work-at-any-cost culture -- I&amp;#x27;m not.  I work about 45 hours a week, no weekends or nights outside of rare emergencies.  That&amp;#x27;s certainly good for my mood and my relationship with my family and so forth.&lt;p&gt;But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking.  The universe does not often line up to give us win-wins like this.  My belief is that, probably, for at least a lot of people, if you spend a few years working super hard, you&amp;#x27;ll probably gain a lot of skill and be highly productive.  Maybe if you keep that up for decades, accumulated stress will make it a net negative.  Maybe some people have really low tolerance for stress and will much more rapidly turn to net negative.&lt;p&gt;But the idea that it is universally or near-universally true that everyone is more productive on a 40 hour week is at best under-argued, and, I&amp;#x27;d guess, probably mostly untrue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dahart</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s some data &amp;amp; has a bunch of references to more data.
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lunar.lostgarden.com&amp;#x2F;Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lunar.lostgarden.com&amp;#x2F;Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The claim is not that 40 is some kind of hard threshold, and if you work any more than that you&amp;#x27;ll be instantly less productive. The claim is that a steady-state of, say, 60 hours per week is less productive long term. It&amp;#x27;s actually more productive for a little while, like a month, but then people get tired and less productive than rested 40-hour workers after that.&lt;p&gt;I have experience doing long periods of 80 hour weeks, when I was working in game development. I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to say definitively that productivity goes negative, that&amp;#x27;s not what it felt like when we were crunching. OTOH, I did watch as tired crews would make bad decisions during crunch that ended up costing time in the long run, and I can definitely say that 80 hour weeks are not twice as productive as 40 hour weeks.</text></comment>
<story><title>Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-software-engineer/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aetherson</author><text>Yeah, I&amp;#x27;d like to see some actual data.  Some kind of scientific study, anything.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t say this because I&amp;#x27;m a proponent of work-at-any-cost culture -- I&amp;#x27;m not.  I work about 45 hours a week, no weekends or nights outside of rare emergencies.  That&amp;#x27;s certainly good for my mood and my relationship with my family and so forth.&lt;p&gt;But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking.  The universe does not often line up to give us win-wins like this.  My belief is that, probably, for at least a lot of people, if you spend a few years working super hard, you&amp;#x27;ll probably gain a lot of skill and be highly productive.  Maybe if you keep that up for decades, accumulated stress will make it a net negative.  Maybe some people have really low tolerance for stress and will much more rapidly turn to net negative.&lt;p&gt;But the idea that it is universally or near-universally true that everyone is more productive on a 40 hour week is at best under-argued, and, I&amp;#x27;d guess, probably mostly untrue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s comments like this that really make me sad about the state of labor solidarity among tech professionals. Like, please, stop torpedoing our negotiation position, especially on a public forum that many technical employers and managers read.&lt;p&gt;On the object level, I have a suspicion that being productive past 40 hr&amp;#x2F;wk or so has reverse causation for me. It&amp;#x27;s bad for me to work over 40 hours a week, so that magically translates into being bad at it. Social negotiation is one of those things that your non-verbal and emotional parts is really good at, and Thomas Schelling style &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t have the ability to do things you don&amp;#x27;t want others to pressure you into doing&amp;quot; strategies work.</text></comment>