Editor’s Note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about tech news and digital culture. He writes regular columns about social media and tech for CNN.com.
Story highlights
Facebook COO says she leaves work every day at 5:30 p.m.
Pete Cashmore: That should be acceptable for everyone, not controversial
Employers and employees have to make living a healthy life socially acceptable, he says
Cashmore: "The measure of our work is in our productivity, not the number of hours we put in"
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently set off quite a debate in the tech world when she told an interviewer that she works a 9-to-5 schedule:
“I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids,” Sandberg said in a video posted on Makers.com. “I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.”
Here’s the essential questions raised by the tech executive’s comments and the debate that followed: In a competitive industry where your work is never truly complete, has it become socially awkward to leave work at a time that used to be the standard?
Pamela Stone: Bravo to Sandberg for leaving at 5:30
And are those working eight-hour days that end at 5 p.m. being quietly judged by their co-workers? Whatever happened to “work-life balance”? Worse still: Are those who work these “standard” hours being overlooked for promotions?