I spent my time studying the code base and the requirement. By the end of the day, I told them around ~20 hours. It was a fairly easy project.
I spent a month and a half to complete the project. What I didn't take into account was how long it will take to get resources from them. When I asked a question, it took anywhere from 48 hours to an entire week to get a response. When I completed a task, I got no response.
But I needed to be on call because they would sent hundreds of emails about everything except what was needed. I charged them for all the hours I spent waiting for them, and reading long emails that led nowhere.
I'm amazed by how often this rule has turned out to be reasonably accurate, though I'm sure there's some selection bias at work. And it certainly starts breaking down when you begin estimating in multiple months - however I would counter that if you're able to credibly estimate months of work on a solution, then you don't need this particular rule of thumb :)
Currently 1.5 decades in.
http://reboot.pro/topic/1013-h7pluginbuilder/?p=16104
and it doesn't affect only software projects.
Shouldn't apply - in theory - to Germans, but as the following post suggests about the Brandenburg airport, it may.
Empirically this rule of thumb tends to be more accurate that the better known ninety-ninety rule:
1 day = 2 weeks
20 hours = 40 days
1 month = 2 quarters
1 year = 2 decades. =)
I've been a self-employed software engineer for more than a decade and I've worked on 100+ projects. Very few of them got done on the original timeline, but none of them were overdue to anything close to this degree.
If I tell a client it'll take 3 weeks and it takes 6 months, there will be a mountain of shit raining down on me (and them), starting with them never working with me again, and possibly ending with them refusing to pay at all or legal action.
Not to mention that you'll never win the project in the first place if you start quoting your estimates this way: "Hmm, that $4,000 site that I think will take 20 hours at $200 / hr to build? I'll just quote it at $64,000 to be on the safe side."
(Note: just an example, you shouldn't price projects this way anyway)
These naive rules of thumb are always so arbitrary too. Why bother with the doubling and changing of units, just multiply by 1000 and call it a day.
A much better rule of thumb is 1.5x to 3x, depending on how conservative and experienced you are, how many risk factors the project has, how much you'll be depending on the client, etc.
Software is really hard to estimate properly, and cost and timeline overruns are a fact of life. But if you regularly find yourself 10x overdue, you should probably revisit the way you're doing this.
Major IT projects are almost double over on timeline on average, but not 8-10x: https://www.economist.com/business/2005/06/09/overdue-and-ov...
Anecdotally, when I worked as an investment banking analyst, there was hardly anything to do from 9-5, then 6-8 hours of work was dumped on my desk at 5pm. Half of that work was un-doing changes I made the day before because the VP on the team didn't like the updates the Associate wanted. Organizations are set up to be inefficient in order to signal how serious they are and what hard workers they have.
Fire the Workaholics IIRC was a 37signals blog article that brings some sanity to unreasonable, unproductive patterns.
I receive a thank you note from our practice lead every time my utilization exceeds 100% in a week. I have repeatedly asked to be removed from such "congratulatory" emails, as I don't find it something to be lauded. In my mind, this means I/we have not properly planned, scheduled, costed, or staffed a project.
Market disagrees though; long hours are absolutely the norm in my segment, and while I've seen managers of all types, those more and less understanding that there's life outside of the office, nonetheless there is an overall feeling that if you're not working long hours, you're not working hard or contributing or dedicated enough.
At the same time, it is an accepted paradigm that project/client/company will suck what they can out of you, and it's up to you to set the limits, communicate them and deliver quality. I have observed people who at beginning of the project indicate "I will take my vacation, and I will spend my weekends at home", and due to quality of their work and abilities, are respected, promoted, recognized.
So there's culture and there's individual response to the culture.
[personally, I "enjoy" a sprint or two every now and then, there's excitement in building something and working hard towards it; but still believe that continued crunches are failure of planning. That doesn't mean I'm immune to them :P, just that I refuse to consider them the norm]
I think the dirty secret is that as long as you hit the meetings you're supposed to be at, and show your face at strategically useful times, nobody cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long as the work gets done.
> The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.
This is generally good advice to live by. If something is worth doing, you are wildly better off just doing it, rather than asking for permission to do it. At best, the thing you wanted to do will get denied, and at worst so crusted up with input and bikeshedding from everyone that is sucked into it that it is actively detrimental.
That only works if the people with authority have the desire and ability to determine whether the work is being done. When they don’t, easy metrics like working hours unfortunately are what they care about.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a productive 100hr week in some kind of MMO player.
Is that your personal observation or do you have access to some actual data? I imagine pro-gaming teams do use all kinds of analytics to maximize their performance, stuff like hours played, hours slept, nutrition, physical exercise ... so there must be some pretty good datasets out there. Unfortunately probably all closely-guarded secrets.
In my own experience as a heavy Anki user, I have found sleep to be the most important determiner of performance. When I sleep 1–2 hours less, my error rate the next day roughly doubles.
Imagine having to continue working like that.
I still work more 40 hours a week, but nowhere near the level I did in the past.
Some sprints I will get 3-4 sprints worth of work done whereas in others I won’t be able to complete my work.
Since I started smoothing out my performance I have gone from being seen as a decent dev to a 10x dev.
As such, on a meta level, the "product" in this regard is not some kind of impartial measurable standard of client-related vigilance, but rather, constant reinforcement of a perception in the client's mind. And so, it's totally rational that, for example, investment banking associates will always respond to a late-night email from the client's internal M&A guy or corporate development lady on the same night the incoming email was sent -- even if it's an email of the "hey no need to respond to this, just wanted to make sure I sent you the attachment" variety. Maintaining the perception that someone is always watching the store is paramount not only in maintaining client relationships, but also in justifying high fees.
I find modern communications are a big help in this regard. In past lives, there often was no real replacement for being literally "by the phone." Though I still took month-long vacations in those days which some co-workers found rather hard to comprehend.
a) I do some consulting for a healthcare company, and bill them by the hour. It is very difficult to reach 60h/month, I managed to get that once, and it translated to an incredible amount of work. Initially they were worried about the cost, and put a cap of 80h/mo, but I never got even near that.
b) Back in the 1990s I worked as technical support for a small ERP company. I had a colleague that kept a frantic pace the whole day, did a lot of overtime, always buried by work, complaining, etc. He had so many booked overtime hours, he took a 3-week vacation solely on them (in Brazil you have 30 day of vacation per year, as well).
Those 3 weeks were the most quiet I ever saw in my work. I even found the K&R book and learnt C (I was really amused to find that UNIXes came with a free compiler. Development tools used to cost several thousand USD back then.)
None of the consultants I know of would estimate a time requirement (other than something incredibly loose) for any kind of job bigger than a few hours. The MO seems to be some version of:
"You give me [the consulting firm] a maximum per week that you can afford on this, and we will have a weekly stand up where we talk about what was completed, what will be completed by next week, and how we can allocate resources to accomplish these things."
To me this seems like an incredibly good way of managing this relationship. However, plenty of people I talk to on the other side (trying to hire consultants) insist that they need a full bid of how much time a project will take.
I almost always tell these people that I can't really give them that answer, and that I also to be wary of anybody who actually responds to this question.
Am I the strange one here?
I almost wonder if this is the source of the overage that is being talked about in this article. They're quoting them $foo hours per week, when in reality it will take $foo/4. So when they get the work and finish it at $foo/2, they don't lose money.
That seems really dishonest to me.
Business works great making the Model T Ford on an assembly line. A small improvement to the assembly line will cost X and result in Y more cars being built. If you need to make more cars it costs N to make a whole new line. All easy to budget for and the business becomes easy - no surprises, not failed projects. Of course as Henry Ford discovered the hard way (apparently more than once) eventually your competition will invest in something a little more open ended that will produce results.
The usual model is to budget 3-5x the actual requirements, filling it with knowledge transfer and other complete the work you can accomplish yourself as early as possible and and milk as long as possible.
You need to do them at different times and for different reasons. The top-down estimation at the start of a project needs to be done to the lowest level of detail necessary to get a Go/No-Go decision made. You can't realistically start an Agile-managed project without understanding where $10k is in the ballpark of $10M. That's just foolish. This top-down estimation needs to be done to the level-of-detail and accuracy required by your Go/No-Go decision.
Then, on a day-over-day basis, you use Agile to manage the actual project operating process. (I'm speaking loosely here, of course, as long as Agile makes sense.) This allows you to be dynamic week-over-week and respond to outside forces, new information, new technology, etc., within your budget.
What people miss is that no sensible project sponsor is going to accept, "we'll finish it when we finish it for however much it costs" unless it's pure research. And if I only need accuracy to the closest $10M, then we can keep the estimates high-level, if I need it to the closest $10k, then we need lower level estimates. It's just the nature of it. As a project sponsor, I need to know what's possible.
" For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads."
Well, duh. The customer is the limiting factor in a lot of cases and downtime means you get to focus more on the work (when you're actually working)
I'd like to think that programmers have a creative or even artistic occupation (personally I'm more manager than programmer these days). Forcing something creative out is rarely good or even possible. The majority of the employees in my organization are in sales. There's a limit to where you can push that for most people too, but it is a different kind of limit.
Personally I've only put in proper 80-hour work weeks something like three times working as a disillusioned startup "employee" or as a consultant in extreme crunch because of launch marketing costs. Sure, something is deployed and it you certainly feel a sense of accomplishment but it's not something that should be used by any serious company expecting people to stay longer than a year or two.
With that said: people checking/answering their email or checking error logs at odd hours "for free" really do bring value to a company though.
I don't think of myself as having trouble with work/personal separation. I like my vacations, try to enjoy work trips, and don't feel obliged to work into the night.
That said, I tend to scan my email when on vacation or if I'm watching TV at night and, if there's something I can deal with in a few minutes or at least flag as "I'll get back to you next week," why not?
I get that time outside work belong to the employee but people who can be even the slightest bit flexible with that have an inherent extra value.
- The rest of your life is exactly where you want it to be. So, this one isn't true for 99% of the population.
- You have the correct mental attitude for it. This isn't true for most of the population either.
- You are doing exactly what you want to do in life. The chance that you could be distracted by another possibility / avenue is next to nil.
None of the above are impossible asks, but they certainly unreasonable. But some managers like to ask anyway, mostly as a form of leverage. If you're foolish or desperate enough to fall for it, then well, only fools and desperate people will give you time week after week to listen to how much you hate your boss / job.
However is it worth it? If you are single and getting paid a lot it might be - with the idea that you save everything and retire early. If you have a social life at all (including a family) and this is a less than once a year request, taking one for the team is probably the right thing to do, but only if it really is a rare thing.
If what you suggest is done, then you are basically selling your youth for equivalent time with an older body.
It may even be worse, since a 50 year old you may be worth a lot more /hr than you are now. So it isn't even an equal trade.
I have struggled to understand workoholic mentality for a while. Sure you work more, but to what end. For what ?
In a typical 40 hour work week, it'd take me 80 hour 'of time at work' to actually get the 40 hours of actual work, meaning most weeks, I might to 18-25 hours of actual work.
The issue, I think here, is requiring people to go to a place, to do a thing, for X hours per week - given the ability to be flexible about working hours, most people will do more, in less time, and be more available for customer needs.
It’s not the working hours that take the toll on you but the lifestyle in general. Just consider this from the article: “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said
Yes, I did that too. You’re dead zombie walking after a couple of weeks getting up at 4:30am just to be back at 5/6pm to play with the kids, catch up on mails and calls you’ve missed after the family went to bed until 11/12 or even 1am just to get up at 4:30am again for the next round
I agree with the point about the weird American workaholism and the very peculiar boring personalities, low worldliness, and loneliness of the highly paid American professional.
>>"Consulting and Finance are like sports..."
In my experience this is exactly true. Assuming competence in the area you are consulting - It is most definately a sport of managing expectations more than doing actual work. Companies expect to be billed for time you spend sitting around waiting for emails and other things of that nature. More hours "worked" is not equal to more actual "work".
Oh yes, everyone must be there in person because it’s critical they hear it directly (so you can bill us $5000 for a 30 minute call).
It's vastly easier to project a convincing illusion than it is to sustain a reality. Self interested, shrewd people will always put their energy into the illusion. Illusions give you massive leverage. Reality grinds you down.
And the conscientious and the passionate burn their energies to actually help the magicians cast their shabby spells.
We also had this when our application just went into a royal meltdown earlier this year and we had pretty much constant OOH work to do. Eventually we arranged that I don't come into the office for a week or more, and I'll just work reduced night hours. This allowed us to tackle that mayhem much more effectively - they'd figure out issues and create patches and manual tasks. I'd apply them overnight, and hand them everything that caught on fire this time. I don't like to work at night, but I'm the guy without ties and who's gonna complain about 20 - 25 hour weeks?
This is the takeaway from the article. Hours worked != delivered value. One of many reasons I've always steered consulting engagements towards another compensation model, e.g. weekly retainer fees.
The question then is: under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong? Why do notable outliers (i.e., people like Elon Musk) do the opposite of consensus and perform so well (Elon in particular not only consistently works 80+ hour weeks, but seems to multitask quite a bit)?
The interesting data points are always the outliers, not the averages.
How would you even measure low productivity time for someone like Musk who has incredible leverage?
For example I was chatting with a friebd about his companies product and it sounds awesome.
Yet for me this was a “low value” conversation as I know I couldnt get my workplace to purchase it.
Musk on the other hand can delegate the evaluation and if it’s a good fit his company will buy it.
So for Musk the same conversation could be very high productivity.
From all outwards appearances, Elon Musk may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His public behaviour is becoming increasingly irrational, erratic, and likely counterproductive to his businesses. (TSLA private at $420, boring questions, pedoguy, etc.)
A couple of stupid comments don’t indicate you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
If that was true the vast majority of us would permanently be on the verge of a breakdown.
Either way, if he built even slightly decent companies, what Musk does should have very little effect on their trajectory unless he wants it to.
I do not think it is possible to work in a software only role for 80 hrs/week productively. That that's just me.
Someone I read suggested (specifically regarding Musk), it's a productive state of hypomania, that isn't full-blown mania.
A great show on the topic is House of Lies. Though most consultants won't claim to have seen everything in the show, they have seen about half.
If you can, it’s very plausible to work a 55ish hour week (excluding the occasional hell weeks) with the same if not better work product and great client and employer satisfaction
"How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters"
and the author makes a Big Deal over this being a "man" thing.
Why do the people at "hacker news" want to gloss over the sexism behind the author's shaky premise? Normally an inflammatory article like this would be [flagged] and the submitter shadowbanned.
EDIT: Here's the DOI string of the paper referenced:
10.1287/orsc.2015.0975
Except that they didn't measure productivity, they measured performance reviews. Those might not be the same things.
I think it has long been known that if you make a big fuss about your contributions, you will be noticed more (and maybe even be promoted). Productivity and perception of productivity might be only weakly correlated.
I don't know if the conclusion should be to fake more, or for managers to notice more. In any case, would expect the market to take care of it (good workers aggregating in companies that notice their productivity).
"A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods."
[Edit: Unfortunately, a moderator made a similar error and revised the title. Ah well.
The previous title was: How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters]
