this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Having worked in various countries of Europe with various different work cultures, I can guarantee you that at least in Software Development the productivity of working more than 8h a day regularly (you can get away with doing it for a week or two, but no further) is so much less than in with 8h/day or less, that you're literally producing less results with your work in a whole long-hours day of work than you do in an 8h day.
In simple terms, tired people do negative work and people working long hours regularly end up chronically tired.
Maybe it works differently for people doing stuff that's all about salesmanship (like Business Angel) for whom more hours means more "meets", but in my personal experience it definitelly works as I described for people actually doing heavy thinking work that has to actually work rather than merelly doing talkie-talkie with hard to compare results and where efficiency is near impossible to measure.
I understood that when once we decided to stay longer and worked for 12h one day, and then spent the next morning un-fucking what we screwed up during those extra hours.
Or when I spent an hour debugging something late in the day, only to come in the morning and find the problem in 15 mins. At least in software development, effectiveness dramatically drops when you're tired and it's really not worth it killing yourself to do something 2h faster.
I work in IT support, which is basically the next pond over from development. Because the job is so mentally intensive, if I'm working on complex tasks for more than 4-5 hours, my brain is catatonic by the time I hit the end of my shift.
Mental effort, is still effort. Most of the time you can't see that someone is mentally tired, but it is just as debilitating as being physically exhausted.
I can not do my job while mentally exhausted. One screw up from me, and I have the ability to, entirely by accident, take out an entire organizations ability to do useful work.
Some of my clients, I've seen log into the system at 8AM or earlier, and still be online after midnight. I don't understand how they're getting anything useful done by that time.