Start time
In about a year and a half working in Berlin, I learned more than during the same time at the university. So, I consider myself lucky as I got hands-on experience with data and learned a lot about business practices along the way. However, without significant time investment, this would not have been possible.
How much time did I spend? The following scatter plot shows working hours on the abscissa and the hours I should have worked in gray. The actual hours worked are shown in blue. Each dot represents one week. I’ve included LOESS-fit for orientation.
My contract stated 40 hours per week, and as a result, most of the gray dots are located at this height. However, due to team events and holidays, many other weeks have fewer contract hours.
My actual hours of operation, shown in blue, are fairly close to the gray dots. In a sense, this is not surprising. A full day off cuts both the hours you have to work and the hours you actually work.
Both lines go down towards the end of my job because I was saving up my vacation. Before leaving, I took a lot of days off and thus shortened my working hours.
The blue LOESS-fit line for actual working hours is mainly above the gray LOESS-fit line for agreed working hours. This is an indication that extra hours were common. To approximate this aspect of the data, I plot the actual extra hours per week as a percentage of contract work hours.
Each dot represents additional hours in one week. The gray line represents the perfect case of no extra watch. The orange line represents a 5% range around the zero line. I consider 5% extra hours to be more or less normal. This will be reduced to two hours in a forty hour week.
It is difficult to notice a clear development in extra hours over a year and a half. The LOESS fit even increases slightly after my work was completed, although it was clear then that I would be leaving.
A potential extra hour compensation scheme
There are many ways in which organisations can compensate their employees for extra hours. A common one is career advancement. Alternatives include time and money.
In this blog post I won’t pick sides as to how extra hours should be compensated. I would argue though that they should be compensated somehow.
As mentioned above, a 5%-range around the contractual working hours is probably inevitable. Anything beyond that should be compensated somehow, I believe. This comes down to the working weeks outside the orange lines in this histogram.
How do the weeks with and without extra hours compare?
| extra hours | number of weeks | hours outside 5% range |
|---|---|---|
| less than 5% | 2 | 5 |
| within 5% range | 31 | 0 |
| more than 5% | 27 | 69 |
31, of the 60 weeks for which I have data, lie within the 5%-range. 27 weeks are above, totalling 69 extra hours beyond the 5%-limit.
Conclusion
Working in the Berlin start-up scene was a thrilling ride. While I learned a lot, the ride took its toll in terms of working extra hours. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs, is a personal decision. An analysis, like the one presented here, can help to ground the decision in data.
The complete code to recreate the analyses and plots of this blog post can be found on github here.
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