Time to Coordinate

Engineers in the United States are expected to work 70- and 80-hour weeks routinely. Research on groups of software engineers working in India, China, and Hungary indicates that such work hours are not inherent in the work. Rather, work-time standards and norms are found to vary across the three sites studied. Moreover, the way work is coordinated among engineers and between engineers and their managers appears to perpetuate these work-time standards and norms. Both the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.