He also doesn't really think well from the company's perspective, here's an Employee FAQ to complement the Boss FAQ on what's not addressed:
1. There is a fixed cost to having an in-house employee no matter how many hours he/she works. Healthcare, Office Space, Parking, lunch, any subscriptions to systems per-head etc. So inherently it's a bad deal to lower % productivity because these cost stay same. Note that not only these costs don' decline, company now has to hire more people to replace lost time, and incur these costs for those people as if they're full-time. So instead of fixed cost going from 1x->.8, it actually goes to 1.25x to get same amount of work done!! (assuming 80% productivity at 5h)
2. Even if (1) wasn't an issue, splitting a project to a larger team is inherently less efficient. The communication overhead of a 2 person team (1 comm. channel to manage) is 1/3 of a 3 person team (3 relationships/channels). Communication complexity increases exponentially with team size.
3. Time & context are very important to competitiveness in technology. Doing the same project in the same #hours and same $ is irrelevant in the real world if Team1 did it in one 4 weeks real-world time and Team2 did in 6 weeks of real world time, even if total hours worked is same. Likewise, employees build company and project context faster, can iterate faster, acquire relevant domain knowledge faster, and thus become more productive in Team1.
4. Should your stock vest over 5-6 years now instead of 4?
I have run a company for 13 years and I don't have doubt about it at all. Dropping to 5 hours is for sure going to be less productive unless all your employees are terrible in the first place (in which case, just hire people who want to work more).
I am not claiming that the standard 8-hour day is the maximum; but I think if a shorter day is better, I would guess the situation would peak around 7 or 7.5 hours. But again this depends on what kind of people you are talking about. I personally work 60+ hours a week, most weeks, and I prefer it that way.
And you are actually productive for all of the 60 hours?
I work a normal north european 37.5 hour week and I'm productive about 75% of the time. If I'm having an off day, I'll just go home and do something else and come look at the problem from a new angle the next day.
Programming is a creative profession, just piling on the hours doesn't affect productivity in a linear fashion.
I actually believe that the optimal amount of hours depends on the work being performed.
For coding and hard sustained mental work, I believe 8 hours is way too much. That doesn't mean they don't have to think about the work after leaving work - there was an article recently on HN about thinkers having breakthroughs when going on long walks. Maybe a flexible schedule would work best (short burst of intense 80+ hours of coding are also common but not sustainable).
OTOH there are many other kinds of work where working 60+ hours is sustainable long term (though I would advise against much more than that, there's a life to enjoy too!).
Pick a domain that has a very high pressure to meet deadlines (e.g. seasonal releases like games). What are the people who work 5 hours a day shipping versus people slogging months on end?
RE 3, I don't buy it for a typical technology job. 2 weeks or even 2 months of difference is barely enough for the news about your product to break, if you aim for the global market, and the battle is fought and won by marketing teams anyway.
Those were just example figures. A month-long project will finish 1-2 weeks later. A 4 year long project, will finish 1 year later - for instance, a smartphone.
1. There is a fixed cost to having an in-house employee no matter how many hours he/she works. Healthcare, Office Space, Parking, lunch, any subscriptions to systems per-head etc. So inherently it's a bad deal to lower % productivity because these cost stay same. Note that not only these costs don' decline, company now has to hire more people to replace lost time, and incur these costs for those people as if they're full-time. So instead of fixed cost going from 1x->.8, it actually goes to 1.25x to get same amount of work done!! (assuming 80% productivity at 5h)
2. Even if (1) wasn't an issue, splitting a project to a larger team is inherently less efficient. The communication overhead of a 2 person team (1 comm. channel to manage) is 1/3 of a 3 person team (3 relationships/channels). Communication complexity increases exponentially with team size.
3. Time & context are very important to competitiveness in technology. Doing the same project in the same #hours and same $ is irrelevant in the real world if Team1 did it in one 4 weeks real-world time and Team2 did in 6 weeks of real world time, even if total hours worked is same. Likewise, employees build company and project context faster, can iterate faster, acquire relevant domain knowledge faster, and thus become more productive in Team1.
4. Should your stock vest over 5-6 years now instead of 4?
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