Despite this making a lot of sense, I’m afraid you can only apply it to your own business.
No one paying you a fixed wage will ever agree that working less hours for them is better than working more.
No one paying you a fixed wage will ever agree that working less hours for them is better than working more.
When I was running startups a decade ago I would regularly ask devs not to work so many hours. Grind culture was a thing, and it made our code much worse. The effect of lack of sleep and a shitty work/life balance is abundantly obvious in a PR.
Anecdotal, but as I’ve moved from a series A, to an established startup, to a unicorn, to FAANG, I’ve found myself shipping code at a lower velocity every step of the way.
At my first job I was the second contributor to a project which didn’t do PRs. If it worked, just push it. My present process is a bit more involved!
I’m happy to hear you say this, and happy that in general the grind culture of the 2010s is being left behind.
The combination of long hours, daily stimulants, and minimal planning can make for some very fast MVPs, and that’s about it. Any time I’ve been in a position where I’m burning the midnight oil to make a deadline, I’ve always looked back at the code with great regret. The “fuck it, ship it” mentality makes for some really crappy software, it’s nice that most people are coming around to this.
Here in the Netherlands more and more companies (particularly small and young companies) will actually just measure output (vs just say they do as long as you warm your chair 40 hours a week). So they don't think me working less is better, but they also don't care as long as my work is done.
The irony here is that "40 hour week of 'productive' work" is also gamed/wrong...
I think, given the right culture, other measures might work well. Not perhaps for a bonus structure, but for helping employees honestly evaluate how they're doing.
Very productive people can get more done and therefore climb the ladder, earn higher bonuses, etc. without eating into their personal time in the way that their less productive colleagues might have to.
