I just finished reading The Masters of Doom and really got the impression that working more hours made Carmack more productive than nearly everyone else in the field.
I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion. I can imagine productivity at an assembly line job having a peak such that overworking grinds someone down to the point that they become a liability, but people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits. Even in menial jobs, it is sort of insulting – “Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that. Obsession can be rather fulfilling, although probably not across an entire lifetime.
This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
You're pretty much right here, but it's important to be clear that the article does not suggest restricting working hours, it suggests changing the norm in an unspecified way. Granted, in Britain this has always been done with restrictive laws. The norm used to be for 9 year olds to work in factories for 15 hours a day. This was changed progressively to reduce to a norm of 40 hours a week for adult males only, and then has included adult females and slowly been rising since.
There are ways other than just saying that people can't work more than 35 hours a week. You can require overtime loading, you can change bargaining laws, you can change the employment conditions of people employed directly by the government. This doesn't impinge on anyones freedom more than current laws (i.e minimum wage, health and safetly, child labour, non-discrimination)
It's also important to remember that the having "some tactical discretion", and "being aligned with their job’s goals" in your job is rare. Most people dislike their jobs and most jobs are pretty pointless. There's an equality issue here that isn't the one you're thinking about: more access to meaningful work? If there's only so many hours of meaningful paid work to be done, wouldn't it be better to sacrifice a bit of efficiency to have as many people as possible doing a smaller amount of this work?
It is really important to not confuse individual with collective reasoning. It's pretty clear from the article that it doesn't apply to all cases. (And from what I've heard, you're a famously extreme outlier here) Yes, there will be negative consequences to any change, but you don't make society wide changes by looking at outliers.
> Research shows that shorter work weeks are just as effective.
John Carmack:
> I feel like longer work weeks are more effective.
Does anyone else see the problem with this?
Of course, pop-sci writing is often terrible. Of course, headlines can wildly misrepresent the research they're covering. Of course, there may be issues at stake (such as, in this case, personal freedom) beyond the simple phenomenon being described.
However, if you have an issue with the research's methodology, explain it. It might even be a little interesting to hear a new conflicting hypothesis from your own anecdotal experiences.
As it happens, regarding the quality of pop-sci journalism, on this particular issue, the research on the starkly diminishing returns of overtime and the negative impact it has on work (especially creative work) is all pretty consistent. For those who do not have the luxury of working in cushy chair-sitting industries like Mr. Carmack and myself, overtime is strongly correlated with an increase in industrial accidents, both fatal and otherwise.
I really wish that high-status people in the software industry would stop thinking that their success exempts them from cognitive bias and the need to make a rational argument, or that their experience writing software somehow transfers, with no particular education, to social science or management.
The problem with this opinion is neatly summed up by this statement:
> Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more.
which has been all but proven wrong by repeated scientific studies. In the general case, it is not true. In the specific cases of outliers where it appears to be true, my understanding of the research indicates that the "People with the psychological makeup that allows them to productively pursue a goal obsessively for well over 40 hours a week will tend to be extremely successful". But this attribute is highly unusual, and it may not be something you can cultivate; people who are taller also tend to do better in life, but that does not mean that the average person should torture themselves on the rack for 80 hours a week in the hopes of getting taller, either.
These two fall into the awful pop-sci writing category:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-...
“And it seems that more productive—and, consequently, better-paid—workers put in less time at the office”
“So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive.”
These are clearly confusing correlation with causation, and I doubt very much that any of the actual researchers involved, as opposed to op-ed writers, would even imply that if only the workers in Greece would ease up a bit, they would get the productivity of Germany. Would you make that statement?
I don’t find much to argue with here. I don’t dispute the premise that working very long hours can have a health impact in some cases.
It was interesting to see the clear step function in the leading graph of average annual work hours by country with the US at ~1850 as the highest of the mostly-western countries, but Thailand, Hong Kong, and South Korea in a distinctly different class, topping out at ~2450 for South Korea. That made me smile, because one of the Samsung people we work with referred to us at the Oculus Dallas office as “honorary Koreans” because of how hard we work. I do note that the chart in the Economist link with more recent data has them still at the top, but down to ~2100 hours in 2012.
A couple interesting (unrelated) counterpoints from the studies:
Sokejima and Kagamimori [1998] observed a U-shaped relationship: as compared with 7 to 9 hours of work per day, higher risk (for cardiovascular problems) was associated with both shorter hours (less than 7 hours a day) and longer hours (more than 11 hours a day)
Nakanishi et al. [2001b], however, published the opposite results: white collar workers reporting 10 or more hours of work per day had a lower risk for developing hypertension when compared with workers reporting less than 8 hours of work per day
There are some small bits directly discussing performance:
3.2d Extended Work Shifts and Performance
Two laboratory studies reported deterioration in performance with extended shifts.
In contrast, four field studies reported no differences in their performance measures during extended shifts.
3.4b Very Long Shifts and Performance
A study in Ireland by Leonard et al. [1998] reported declines in two tests of alertness and concentration in medical residents who had worked 32-hour on-call shifts. They reported no significant declines in a test of psychomotor performance or a test of memory. A New Zealand survey of anesthesiologists linked long working hours to self-reported clinical errors [Gander et al. 2000].
I glanced at the other links, and they look potentially interesting, but non-responsive as far as giving actual data showing that working more than 40 hours a week makes you less productive.
Perhaps there is confusion about my position, so let me clarify:
Average productivity per hour will decline with extended work. The highest average hourly productivity could be with shifts as short as six hours for many people; I have no particular thoughts on this, as I have never had reason to care to optimize it. An assembly line job that is embarrassingly parallel with minimal communication overhead may well be better served to have shorter shifts and more workers.
Total net productivity per worker, discounting for any increases in errors and negative side effects, continues increasing well past 40 hours per week. There are a great many tasks where inefficiency grows significantly with additional workers involved; the Mythical Man Month problem is real. In cases like these, you are better off with a smaller team of harder working people, even if their productivity-per-hour is somewhat lower.
This is critical: it isn’t necessary to maintain performance on an extended shift to still contribute value. Productivity per hour can deteriorate, even precipitously, and still be non-negative. Only when you are so broken down that even when you come back the following day your productivity per hour is significantly impaired, do you open up the possibility of actually reducing your net output.
There are cases where the consequences of an increased error rate can be a dominant factor -- airline pilots and nuclear plant operators come to mind. I had to work under FAA mandated crew rest guidelines while operating the Armadillo Aerospace rockets, and I made no complaints.
I believe most research that people glance at and see “declines in productivity with longer hours” are talking about declines in productivity-per-hour, and people jump to the incorrect conclusion that you can get just as much done in less time.
You called my post “so wrong, and so potentially destructive”, which leads me to believe that you hold an ideological position that the world would be better if people didn’t work as long. I don’t actually have a particularly strong position there; my point is purely about the effective output of an individual. If we were fighting an existential threat, say an asteroid that would hit the earth in a year, would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?
Okay, let's ignore all them pesky negatives of overworking, like killing a patient from time to time or messing with the wrong piece of data somewhere. Let's also ignore the issue of personal freedom vs. the hours mandated by your employer. Let's focus only on maximizing the total output you can generate. As I understand, this is your case.
The metric productivity-per-hour is stupid. It's useless trying to optimize it - just like you said. The natural cycle for humans is a day. The body requires rest and is tuned to have an optimal performance if the do/rest cycles are loosely synced with the day/night cycles of the sun. You need to optimize that cycle, in the long run, to maximize your total output.
"... when you come back the following day your productivity per hour is significantly impaired, do you open up the possibility of actually reducing your net output."
Yes, I do. The burnout today at work has an effect on your productivity tomorrow. In attempt to get a little extra done today, tomorrow you won't be that efficient at your peak, and you'll be more tired and unproductive at the and of the day, compared to the previous. This way your average productivity per day, from both days, can easily be lower than if you had worked 3 hours less the first night and the second day were just as efficient and productive as the first.
This effect extends in a long run. Fatigue accumulation and sleep debt are real phenomenons. Poorly managed day-to-day cycles can render people incapable of doing any meaningful work. The remedy is rest/vacation, which kills your averages even more.
You should know, even better than me, that working people don't only produce output. They are learning too. The work that you'll be required to do in a year or two is not the same as the one you do today. Mental fatigue impairs learning new stuff a lot more than it impairs doing stuff you already know.
"If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important."
This is spot on. I think motivation is a huge factor here. Motivated workers are more capable of remaining productive over longer periods. Switching projects/tasks when you run out of gas is usually reinvigorating. Also, some people seem to have more innate motivation like an extended "honeymoon" phase when new people start a job and they are more tenacious and eager to prove themselves.
A cool project is an external motivating factor, or an existential threat ranging from potentially losing your job to being wiped out by an asteroid. As terrible as it is, fear is a great motivator. I've worked on projects so mind numbingly boring and pointless that I've had to change tasks after a couple hours because I found myself staring at my editor hating what I was doing. I've also worked on projects where I could stay motivated and productive 16 hours a day for two weeks at a time trying to meet an important deadline.
Bottom line in my opinion is there's no such thing as a broad rule of thumb for how long someone can stay productive.
> would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?
Everyone? Maybe not. Those whose could make irrecuperable errors and doom the project because of fatigue, certainly. For many professions, longer hours don't necessarily lend to more production, but can certainly become hazardous.
Sure, as long as everyone is paid 2X salary for every hour over 8. I've been abused at work, greatly. It changed my views. Not everyone has the same experiences and perspective.
I would disagree with you in the basic assumption that we let "everything just work out".
We do need laws that those who work over what has long been considered healthy- 8 hours, are compensated very well for their time. To the point that the incentive lies on the employer to hire more people.
There's nothing to stop you or anyone else from forgoing your pay. But working for free to most of us is unacceptable, we don't have as much money thus our transaction of time for money means more. And many have less power to call shots because they may be less valuable or talented.
Yet everyone receiving a paycheck deserves this basic protection from abuse.
"A living" is a rather broad concept. Two factors are grossly overlooked: the general standard of living is rising, and much of that rise results from making it nigh unto illegal to live below that standard. Even the "poor" expect easy indoor heat & AC, toilets flushed with city-supplied drinking water, one car per adult, a cell phone per teen & up, etc. I grew up on hand-split wood heat & no AC, well water, one car for the household, wired phones with 4-digit numbers, etc. - and we were firmly one-income "middle class". Nowadays wood stoves are regulated into near oblivion (near prohibitory particulate limits), heat & AC standards required for "certificate of occupancy" along with high plumbing standards, cars include a plethora of then-unattainable options and must meet very high gas mileage standards, cell phones are a standard welfare item, etc. - all due to well-meaning but subtly devastating requirements to live even in "functional poverty". Normalization of home mortgages, insurance-paid access to extremely high health care standards, and easy access to crushing loans for education, all seem perfectly justified now yet persuasively "force" people to work more and more "to make a living" which many of us saw as luxurious not all that long ago.
You can live well on a whole lot less - as most people did not all that long ago. Ditch the >1000 sq ft homes, instant shirt-sleeve indoor temperatures, waste-encouraging volumes of drinking water, high-MPG with-all-the-features cars, supercomputer-in-your-pocket phones, etc. Get a catastrophic health insurance plan. Pay your way thru college. Downgrade the phone. And elect leaders who seek to make simple living legal, and otherwise decrease burdensome tax rates.
Your "living" standard is your choice. Really. Contain your costs, and you can live on a whole lot less. As always I'll be derided for these observations, but it's what I grew up on.
Sure you can definitely live with lower standard (nice story of yours by the way, remember us how recent progress revolutionized our lives).
But I mean liberating as much as we can people from the necessity of working, and improving their quality of life in general, is a more realistic fight for humanity than destroying an asteroid.
Someone has to do the work; value is not durable nor zero-sum. Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid is assuring the continued opportunity of all to produce as they can & will; confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter. What you describe as "liberating" is mutual enslavement of producers & idle to each other. What you describe as "realistic" is unsustainable no less than the extinction event of an asteroid impact.
"Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid..." But what asteroid ? That's all the point, it's ridiculous to care as much about a non-existing asteroid in the near feature than the plenty of dramatic problems that are causing damages for centuries.
"Someone has to do the work", "confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter".
That's absolutely not what liberating work is about, and what you describe is a pretty narrow view of economics that we're taught since childhood. Investigating a bit economy shows it get way more complicated than that, just defining "productive value" is a very deep subject. I don't believe you and I are able to assess if an economic system is sustainable or not (reality shown even the best economists can't), whereas scientist are pretty accurate about the low probability of an asteroid destroying earth in 2016.
I think these types of studies are all going to be fatally flawed with a bunch of very-hard-to-untangle factors: since "40 hours" (or more) is the "expected norm" then if you're working less you've either fought incredibly hard to do so (which I personally have), you have way more freedom to choose working hours than most people or you're "forced" to work less (or more) for some reason.
e.g. my first thought about the "increased hypertension in workers reporting < 7 hours" (a paper I haven't read, mind) is that they're stressed about finances because they're working part-time (or the "hours" was averaged over the year or something, and they spent some time without a job).
Now, if you've chosen to work many more hours then it seems intuitively obvious that you'll be more productive. There's also the hard-to-study factor of what you're working on. For example, many free-software developers are doing their free-software-developing in their "non-work" hours -- so they might be "working" (in the sense of producing code) 80+ hours a week, but will likely only get "counted" as whatever their day job was. (If there are studies that account for "what you do with your other time" against productivity, I'd be very keen to read them).
In a similar vein -- and as John said in the original post -- if you're "stuck" on something (e.g. can't do any more "design the hard algorithm" thinking) and switch to something "boring" that still needs to be done (e.g. make the Makefile suck less) that's still "more productive". But, as others have pointed out, many developers don't have that freedom -- they have to keep pounding their face against whatever bug they got assigned. And if you're stuck, but have to keep working on it, I'd bet a lot that your productivity goes to shit.
So, all that said, I personally believe (note: not scientific! ;) that we'd be far better off to have shorter expected/forced "working weeks". And I don't mean that everyone should be forced to work less! This may (or may not!) have a "productivity" impact for employers but if you looked at individuals' "productivity" (including work and "non-work" parts) I think it would go way up -- precisely because this would give the vast majority of people way more choice about what they get to work on. This -- I completely unscientifically presume -- would also have a large positive effect on people's reported happiness.
That is, they'd be spending less time smashing their face on that bug at work and get more time to do whatever else they like to do -- free-software, painting, writing, building things, etc.
In any case, I know that for me personally being forced to work 40+ hours a week on the same thing is completely toxic to my creativity and productivity at programming and I've worked very hard to get paid less (to work less). I can also tell you that nearly every co-worker or friend I've told of my myriad different arrangements to achieve this have wanted to do the same (but feel they "can't"). The only exception seems to be when people realize the bit about "paid less" ;) and can't do (or don't want) that. Interestingly, I still have spent a bunch of my increased leisure time writing software -- but for myself, or free-software instead of "for work". Of course, I've also spent a bunch of it doing things for pure enjoyment.
Now, of course, that's all just anecdotal. But, for me, less "must work on X for $" time means a lot more happiness and a lot more "productivity" (if you look at everything I do with my time).
Not everyone is fully utilised at work, nor does every job's output scale linearly with incremental effort. So while the above is true in some cases (particularly for 'assembly line' type jobs, including programming, where there is a constant supply of discrete and valuable tasks) it is also the case that many people are productive for far less than the full time they spend at work and that a shorter working week would result in significant & near immediate productivity increases in a good number of cases. Examples would be bureaucratic work, a lot of generic 'project' roles, and situations where procrastination is common.
Perhaps it's not that people are particularly much more productive over short hours as that presenteeism and the need to be seen to be working long hours masks the true amount of productive time and many people will do less than they could if they think they can get away with it (particularly if they work long hours at a job they dislike), nonetheless it would be better for unproductive time at work to be spent elsewhere and reducing the length of the work week could achieve this.
This is so absolutely true. Your typical corporate office these days is full of wasted time and red tape that acts as a sponge for people's time left on this earth. Just the time a 30 minute commute takes away from one's day is a massive amount of time over one year. Hell if more people could work fewer hours from home, they would probably get the same or more work done and still have more time for themselves.
Most devs can't switch what they're working on: They're on a sprint plan that's estimated to 1/2 day (at least) precision, and checked-on every day at scrum.
Not saying your general point is wrong, but it's not what being an engineer is like for most people today. (BTW, fixing the way work is managed would probably do a lot for both people and firms.)
As you do have a reputation for getting quite a lot done, it would be cool if you'd share a little bit more on how you make long hours productive and manage to maintain focus (or maybe you've written about it elsewhere?).
"people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits"
It depends on so many factors (self interest in the job, capacity, health, age, repetitiveness, nature of the job, stress involved, etc...) that it can be true or false in different cases.
“Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
Negative value might be abusive but those people are for sure less productive in their second job compared to if they wouldn't have to do the first one. But the net production is for sure higher for 2 jobs than 1.
"does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym ... you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly?"
Assuming every activity is consuming the same resource is a very speculative statement. Being exhausted solving a math problem doesn't necessary means you're exhausted to run.
"When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm"
That's assuming every job is made of very diverses tasks. As a core of modern economy, division of labour actually lead to the opposite in many cases. And that's sort of true for many jobs in game industry where your day job can turn very repetitive and all the tasks, no matter how much, looks the very same.
"Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week is going to achieve more" You would need a study to back it up, I would be very curious of the result of these two people over a period of 40-50 years of career at 80 hours per week for one and 40 for the other.
If I care about what I do - I will do it anyways. I don't need to be an employee and go to work, just to be allowed to do what I already want and am doing. Does this make sense to you?
In the end I'm pursuing employment to get paid, you know, and there are only degrees of alignment between a person's current aspirations and the stuff you're going to be paid for. So, what people are trying to argue here is the balance between the time you are required to sacrifice in order to earn enough for a half-decent living and the free-will time in which your actions are motivated otherwise.
Like you once said - it's nice to be in a position where people can't exert leverage on you.
There certainly is a social and political push to this balance towards devoting yourself more to the company's agenda.
As with everything on the internet, this article and action that's making waves around the internet is an oversimplification on what is a really complex problem with a lot of factors and variables.
Your example with a factory worker is great example for that specific type of work, an assembly line, but much like the mentality of "lets work 6 hours instead of 8" craze that's going on it would only apply and benefit a specific type of employee - the average uninterested employee. This is guy/gal is a programmer, accountant, secretary, QA tester whatever that is good enough at what he does to get by and even promote very slowly, has mild interest in what he does for work but not enough to call it passion and does the work mostly for the money. That is actually the majority of intellectual employees, that need a job to live but can't find the dream role that's perfect for them to pump them full of life and excitement every day.
You see Sir, you are privileged enough to have a passion and set of skills that you've worked to develop over the years that actually enable you to go out and do whatever it is that you do best and have fun with it, while still bringing you quite enough money to live off. You wouldn't be able to say that about the guitarists, painters, artists, etc out there who are in very low demand and extremely high supply. Yes the elite of these people will do well, but only the elite. You are an elite in your field John, a well known and recognised symbol of the IT and Gaming industry. Most people are not and cannot afford to live off their dreams.
Thus while this new 6 hour system would not apply to you, because you are passionate about what you do and can invest non-stop effort in what you're doing (don't get me wrong, I'm the same just not as good or popular, Yet :D, but I am fortunate enough to live off of what I like doing best) for everyone else, this system would bring benefit for average employees that are willing to keep their Facebook time for home and work while at work. They will have a few more hours for themselves, their kids, their wives, and potentially even allow them the two extra hours a day they need to transform their hobbies into actual financial successes. \
In my opinion, the solution to this whole conundrum is to stop treating all businesses as they are assembly lines and analyse them on a case by case basis. For example in a micro games studio where you only have 10 valuable employees, a task based system might be a much better approach. "We need the sprites done by date x, the core mechanics by date y, and the sound by date z. I don't care if you work 9 to 5, 6 to 24 or 20 minutes a day, as long as they are complete in time we're golden. Then we can have meetings with the whole team to analyse the quality of your work and based on everyone's input we can determine a set of bonuses for different traits of your work (quality, speed, efficiency, reusability, etc).". This is of course an off the top of my head idea but it would work well in a very small studio where everyone has their meetings at the local Pub.
Unfortunately doing such an analysis and discovery on a large business would be extremely costly, so what's the next best thing? Follow the already well established trend, and copy whatever solution works for a different company (and copy it poorly without understanding why it works for that company). There is a reason why google employees in the US live on the Google campus, but nobody bothers to find out why thus what we get is silly generalisations like the 6 hour work day.
Blimey I went on quite a ramble didn't I? Oh well... apologies for the wall of text for all those that'll end up reading it.
I agree with this, with all due respect to John. The part I like most about your post is where people can choose what to do with that extra time, which may include actually being able to enjoy their family, or doing what I am doing which is learning new skills in my free time, or hey (go crazy) and do both!
The fact is, most of the jobs people don't like doing are going to be automated in the not-so-distant future, which brings up the question of what we humans will be doing when there are less work hours needed to move our society forward. Many people who are working today will NOT be willing or able to train up to meet the higher skills needed for our new world. So what will they be doing as their jobs go away? Don't get me wrong, I do not believe in keeping old jobs around just to keep people employed, but I still don't see this question being answered. I have a lot of friends who are in their 30's and 40's who have 20-25 years of employment ahead of them, but probably cannot rely on their jobs existing that long.
Another question is why are we working so hard on technology to automate and make our lives easier if all we are going to do with that supposedly easier life is work as much or more? Or rather, how long will people have to work jobs they hate, just to keep from living in a box under a bridge?
I'm running my own IT consulting business, which pays the bills, and also frees up more time for me to tend to my son, and to work on learning new skills to break into VR development. I can work basically part time and charge a high enough hourly rate to afford this lifestyle, but I am the exception, not the rule. I actually feel sorry for my family and friends when I see how unhappy they are working 40+ hours, barely seeing their kids before bedtime all week long, and just not being able to chase something that will really make them happy. When will humanity start coming before corporate productivity?
Unfortunately not soon enough. As you said, we are the exception. I'm currently trying to get a VR games studio of the ground, it's not easy but it's a hell of a lot of fun. You do your consultancy business which I'm sure you enjoy enormously and as you've said, 9 to 5 is just a bad dream for you.
But to move the whole of humanity into that direction, the whole of humanity have to be willing to put themselves in our position and actually self-educate and take control of their lives. As you can probably imagine that's not going to happen any time soon.
Mr Carmack over here is a great example of the humanity I would like to live in, but he is the polar opposite of the humanity we actually live in. Sadly most people do not have ambitious dreams of creating new things! They learn enough to get by and that's it. I am of course talking majorities here, I realise exceptions exist but the very sad truth is that people like being comfortable and stationary with very small aspirations in a world that's actually progressing without them. In London we have this funny problem with the Underground: Most of it can be automated, but because of the mass firing that would result, it's not being done due to humanitary reasons. The same humans that are being protected from this mass-atomisation are at the same time demanding absurdly high wages (£50k+) to do tasks that can be conducted by a £3000-£10000 robot and if these demands are not met, strikes!
Same thing with McDonald's in the US. Although somewhat more reasonable there as their wages were quite low, these people are replaceable with some very basic machines. In the UK there are McDonald's with automated ordering and paying stations. I just tap on a large touch screen what I want and stick a payment method in. That £3000 device just replaced a £15000 employee and is a lot more efficient at their job.
It pains me to say this but going forward this is going to be a self-regulating problem. There will at some point be massive unemployment which may cause quite a financial crisis and then it will regulate itself over time. In the new world that will come out of this crisis there won't be any room for non-intelectual people as most automated jobs will be gone. It's funny to think about it this way, but all those young adults getting university degrees, they might need them sooner than they think. The 20-25 y.o. that don't have higher education right now will probably suffer the most in 10 years time.
TL;DR: While what is happening seems very heartless and cruel, with all the automation, it actually seems like a necessary step to evolve as a sentient species.
(As of writing, account created 325 days ago, 1 comment and 2 karma)
It shouldn't really matter because it's 'appeal to authority', but thoughts on worklife/productivity by the Elon Musk's or John Carmack's of the world really do have more impact
I've read about you as an employer under the development of Quake. I can only relate this to you fascist way to force people work. It's a shame tho since you're such a talent and I hope you've changed.
Most people don't work jobs they care about. In an ideal world how people choose to spend their time would be entirely separate from notions of productivity or wages. But the fact is that we operate under a terrible economic system and people are overworked by largely meaningless jobs. In the context of society as it stands today, not only are people overworked, but most people could work less without their respective employers losing money. Because modern businesses operate solely off the principal of maximizing profit, I think it's poignant to point out that it's in their benefit to reduce the work week for their employees.
You can't apply this notion to people who spend their time in meaningful ways. You couldn't say that Picasso would be just as effective with a shorter work week. If people lived reasonable lives and did genuine work, the whole idea of comparing length of work weeks with effectiveness of work would be meaningless. You point out that when people are worn out with a certain activity, they could benefit by just moving on to another. That's true. Reasonably speaking, people shouldn't do anything for even a minute longer than they feel like. But the corporate world does not offer that kind of flexibility. The corporate world is rigid, and people are forced to operate in unnatural ways. Repetition and narrow focus are the bread and butter of this system, meaning you perform a single task over and over for the duration of your work day and that's it. This is the context with which you must examine the idea that "shorter work weeks are just as effective" because this is how most jobs work. I think the reason for pointing out that "shorter work weeks are just as effective" is really to use the ruthless, disconnected, corporate logic of the modern business world against itself.
Now, let me just dispel a myth you stated. You believe that "Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more." This again is modern corporate mentality. Work harder, put in more effort, and you will achieve more. The real world does not operate on these principals. Only menial tasks can be translated into the notion of more effort = higher yields. Lets take the example of Picasso again. Do you think the more time he spent painting in a given week the better his paintings were? Or take Newton. Do you think if he sat down and forced himself to ponder the physical laws of the universe for ten more hours each week he would have made more discoveries? This is a simplistic and completely insubstantial view on the world.
If you examine the lives of truly successful people (by which I mean people like Newton or Picasso or Tchaikovsky, not financially successful like Mark Cuban or Bill Gates) then you realize the only "rule" you can extrapolate from their lives is that people operate best when they do so on their own terms. Not when they work for longer hours or with more perceived "effort", but when they work exactly as they please.
But anyway, that's getting into another topic. I just wanted to point out that the idea that shorter work weeks are just as effective is completely valid when applied to the current and deeply flawed structure of modern work environments. It's not something which can be applied to ideal scenarios which offer flexibility, and frankly that's irrelevant because most people aren't fortunate enough to have that. If we do get to the point where people can work under truly ideal circumstances, the entire notion of productivity or effectiveness will be meaningless. These are concepts which only hinder good work.
Now, let me just dispel a myth you stated. You believe that "Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more."
This works for people like Carmack because he's always gotten to choose precisely what he wants to do in each of those 40+ hours.
Same impression from reading Elon Musk. Though perhaps working that is necessary for outstanding success, but that should necessarily model how we work on normal projects and lead normal lives.
I worked at 50% capacity for some years. It was just great until I chose to want more money for the time being and returned to 70% capacity. That was just great, too, until I realized that I was as productive as a full-time guy without the full-time pay so I eventually went back full-time but trying to keep my output roughly on the same level as I had been getting good reviews all the time.
However, last year I got tired of the full hours and a bit depressed because of lots of factors that prevented me from getting things done, and after one realisation I took a month off. Coming back to work I figured I shall be going with working full hours for three months and then taking a month off again. So that comes to three months of spare time and nine months of work annually.
The realisation was about working patterns. For a programmer like me, the best productivity comes in bursts so I'd happily do three ~12-hour days and keep two days off as opposed to working the official 7.5 hours (in my country) every day. This has always been so, even as a kid. I could work on something really intensively for a few days and then I needed to do something completely different. The newest realization was that it works on longer timescale too. I can work three months and do my absolute best, and then relax and have time for my own things.
This sort of a contract――relax pattern is quite reminiscent to life and nature itself. I feel much at home between the pushes and pulls. I'll see how the first year will turn out to be.
Over the years I've also realised that staying productive is mostly just about conserving these important productivity patterns.
A lot of what happens at work eats away from these patterns but if you can keep them mostly intact then you'll get productivity by default. That is, assuming that you love programming. Hint: if you're known to occasionally spend hours on hacking something at work at an intensity where nobody can pull you away from it, it's a good sign that you love programming.
This sounds amazing and I'm happy you've found a solution that works for you. Unfortunately in my experience this scenario is basically impossible for 98% of people in the US - I assume when you say 'my country' that you are not from the US?
I work in Europe but I'm actually employed by a very much US company. Practically my whole team is in the USA and other than receiving salary locally I have surprisingly little to do with the European subsidiary. I also work from home a lot because working at the office would be effectively telecommuting, too. Decisions such as my unpaid time off come from the US.
My employer is not a particularly conservative company and it helps that my boss is great and if he has to cross-check something with his boss, his boss is great too. And it probably helps to have a somewhat senior position (next milestone: ten years) and having made my mark years ago.
But most importantly: getting your shit done. If you can get your shit done you're in a much better position in getting everyone to agree on more flexibility into your job because companies need to get shit done.
Wise employers recognize that it's of everyone's benefit, including theirs, to keep productive employees in a loose leash with more freedom of choice rather than impose binary requirements on how and when to do the work. If my employer wasn't wise like this some other company would be enjoying the fruits of my productivity as I would've left them years ago.
Even if you work at the very best companies and love your work, work is still always work and it will at some point become too much, meaningless, source of frustration, or any combination of those.
This is exactly my goal as well. I'm currently working a full time job, moonlighting contract jobs on evenings/weekends, with the goal to save enough money to cover my expenses for 6 months. After that I plan to go into full time consulting and specifically target shorter term contracts and take off blocks of time in between. I've always seemed to work best in spurts and software development (new projects anyway) are a good industry for this type of environment.
Yes! This is exactly what I've been thinking for a while as well; I've been sort of badly approximating it by saving up money and taking a while off between jobs.
Next time you're negotiating a salary and they aren't willing to match what you want, don't walk away yet but offer to take the salary with reduced hours in proportion to how much you're missing. Taking an exaggerated example: if you want 150K and they're only willing to pay 100K, suggest to take 100K with 2/3 of the hours. You have nothing to lose but potentially lots to gain.
How do you manage these? I'm most productive that way too. But the trouble is I'll keep going longer than I should, and then I just get tired and unproductive and not sensible enough to rest.
Are there signs you look for to leave it on a high note, or do you use hard time limits?
My old colleage Mike Rowe wisely said "Always leave it compiling". That way you could go home thinking, that was probably the right fix. Then the next day you could go in and see that it wasn't, and pick up where you left off.
I kind of keep a (mostly mental) tally of the week's hours and when I've done a full week +/- N hours, I've done enough. But because of N it's a bit hazy sometimes.
If I can finish something in a day what could've easily taken three days, I'll probably end the week a bit earlier. And if I get fixated on doing some "simple thing" that ends up taking a lot longer, then I allow myself to work extra to get that squashed. It's important keep your conscience fair so that you know you can mentally match the hours with results produced.
Programming isn't strictly about wallclock hours but wallclock hours are a good starting point for measuring a fair effort because your pay is likely to be based on the wallclock too. (Such as 22 days * 8 hours or so.) But some hours are indeed "thick" and some hours are "lean" and you need to balance those somehow. Otherwise you'll be working way too much or way too little in relation to what you are paid. If you only look at the chronographic units you will realize that you can't do so. If I'm walking in the woods and figure out how to architect some component, is that work or not? And how is it work if I sit at my desk for half a day and get nothing done? That's what you have to live with as a programmer and striking the balance is delicate business, but luckily it's enough that you only need to find the balance in the average.
Then again, it's all about shit. As long as you get shit done the hours don't matter. And as long as you don't work too many hours to feel shitty yourself, the scheme is sustainable. That's the ultimate balance.
It was basically about a guy who accidentally travels forward in time (sort of like idiocracy) except he finds himself in an American Socialist Utopia. It was a really good book in general but there was one idea in particular that the author had, which seems pertinent here.
Essentially in this utopia everyone gets the same pay check and the opportunity to work. Instead of getting paid more money for a demanding job you get "paid" in less hours. Meaning, all jobs start out at, say 40 hours per week. A job that doesn't get any applicants would decrease the number of hours it demands and correspondingly, the number of open positions would increase. Eventually an unappealing job would decline to a number of hours where someone would be willing to do it.
For example, that coal mining job that nobody wants to do? Well it pays the same as every other job but you only need to do it for 4 hours a week. You can work more of course if you want but you get the same paycheck. The rest of that time you can do whatever you want, spend time with your family or do art or whatever.
Also, in For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein there are some very interesting ideas about American social economics, including a social credit system. Which I believe is a pretty old fashioned idea that we have almost completely forgot about.
This constant back and forth about work hours and minimum wage and the inexorable pull towards wage slavery makes me think its time to explore some completely lateral options.
Humans have incredible propensity to acclimatize to the environment. That's the only reasoning I could arrive at when I was poor and saw people around willing to do the most mundane back breaking work than to seek other forms of employment.
The lever that is used in society today is desperation as opposed to higher pay per hr in the "Looking Backward" case. The sanitation worker doesn't enjoy their work and no amount of lower hours may compel them to be scarred by the experience. On the other hand desperation and hunger forces them to take what ever job they could salvage. Most of them would would get used to it while some would work their way out.
I believe convincing people to do "bad jobs" by means of desperation is named Wage Slavery. Besides being immoral and degrading, its pretty inefficient. On the other hand, some jobs that need to be done plain out unpleasant. How do you convince someone to do it?
In the Looking Backwards scenario the incentive to do one of the "bad jobs" isn't being paid more per hour, everyone is paid the same, its working less hours which I think is subtly different.
Less hours at the same pay is more money per hour. But there is a subtle difference - cleaning toilets for 2 hours is much different mentally than cleaning toilets for 8 hours. And you can then go look after dogs at the shelter for 4 more hours and get two paychecks.
Everyone needs to pitch in, you need to serve humanity so that it provides you with the things you need. If the only thing you can do to do your part is sanitation work, then sanitation work it shall be. That is, until you find new ways to serve others.
Slavery is something altogether different, and you really have to be in a position of privilege to conflate the two. The history of slavery is an incredibly dark one. Out of respect to those who've suffered under it's cruelty, I don't think it's right to use that word in this context. Doing your part is not slavery.
I think it is very important not to forget another factor - the Protestant Work Ethic. This had a gigantic influence on US culture and we still live with it today. It is the reason people reflexively object to McDonald's workers fighting for higher pay, and don't care that those workers are earning far more for their employer than they are being paid. The Protestant Work Ethic is the belief that the work itself, specifically the suffering endured while performing the work, which is of value. 'Hard work is its own reward'. It is a big part of why the improvements in productivity that came about in the 1980s due to computers and automation technology entering the workplace did not result in higher wages. Because the productivity was not a product of greater human suffering, the people did not 'deserve' any greater pay. The most virtuous are those who struggle and suffer the greatest for the lowest pay. They are paid primarily in the most valuable currency, the suffering, and to suggest that they deserve greater pay or to give them greater pay would denigrate them. Obviously this is not a viewpoint that most people would or can describe specifically. But it is what underlies the prevailing attitudes most people have about work.
To desire easy work, is immoral or weak. To desire high pay for a job which is not tremendously taxing, is immoral or weak. A person who is not working strenuously is inherently a worse person than one who is. It's why the unemployed are looked down upon, and why the working poor, no matter how exploited they might be, are revered as the 'salt of the earth' and the like. It is why it is presumed that a person who is not doing hard physical work is not "really working".
Mental work is of such a fundamentally different character from physical labor that our society simply doesn't know how to process it. The idea that a person, with the use of technology, can produce as much value as 100 people doing the same job manually seems a dirty kind of trick. Dirty either because the person is cheating and skirting the virtuous hard work, or dirty because being willing to accept such a situation is immoral. Wanting a job you love to do, and expecting to be paid well for it, is a fantasy tolerable only in children. To actually expect it is one of the biggest reasons older people say that Millenials seem "entitled" brats. In truth, the Millenials just seem to inherently understand that we're at the point where technology simply makes it the best (for everyone, employers included) course.
The first part made me think that in the past when church was so dominant and had to get people to work for them, this philosophy would have done the trick.
'Hard work is its own reward'
This unfortunately brought the "Work will set you free" quote to mind but I'm not in a position to further comment on it.
I think people in power (Churches, Politicians, CEOs) would always try to portray work in this light as it is inherently valuable for them. I think this might be the case too with the older folks calling Millennial entitled brats.
Also, besides "getting used to it" or "working their way out of it" there are a few other quite grim possibilities that can happen in Wage Slavery.
Namely suffering and early death. Sometimes the workers band together (aka unionize) or straight up rebel causing civil war. These are all things that have happened in the past, could happen again in the future.
Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" also had an interesting mix of ideas, including a scheme where jobs paid based on a three-factor formula (skill required, benefit to society, and unpleasantness of job). It has always struck me as one of the biggest injustices of the current setup that low-skilled but highly unpleasant/dangerous jobs are able to be so badly paid.
In theory this is possible now, right? Why don't employers compete in this way? Is there some insurance/tax/other reason that employers so strongly prefer full-time employees?
I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work.
I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches.
Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.
I never said it was for everyone, but I suspect people magnify the expected issues a lot.
Everyone knows I won't be here on wednesdays, so we try to arrange things so I'm not a bottleneck during that time. If some really important deadline shows up, I'll just work the one wednesday and take thursday off instead, it's not a big deal. I haven't needed to yet though.
Besides, assuming you're not on a really tiny team, if many parts of your project hinge on one person with no available backup, you have bigger problems related to project management.
This is nonsense, although it may depend on the kind of job you have. For most of us, we don't need to be there five days a week. You can plan around that.
Of course if you have five people in a team and everybody has a different day off, you can never get together, and that may be a problem. This is the same if you and your colleagues work many days/hours out of the office or at home.
Pretty much anything can be made to work if it's planned for and executed properly.
Our dev process required a lot of meetings and interaction. So in order to ensure clear blocks of working time, we used to set aside days as "no meeting days" Some people would take the opportunity to work from home on those days since it was guaranteed they wouldn't be pulled into a meeting. Once you know Sally, Jared and Kaitlyn won't be in on Tuesdays, you plan around it.
This happens where I work- one of my coworkers is here Monday - Thursday (10 hour days) but takes Friday off. He's the only one with knowledge of a lot of our legacy systems, so a lot of potential work doesn't happen on Fridays. I'd argue that more of us should learn what he knows to avoid "hit by a bus syndrome" but we don't have enough spare man hours to devote to that.
I did the same for several years at my last job (although with Friday off so I had long weekends). It was great and I'd encourage anyone to try it if they can.
I definitely felt like it made me more productive per hour worked. A shorter week added a little bit of time pressure that helped me stay focused, and I'd often finish something in four days that might otherwise have stretched to five.
Total output was probably a little lower, but I took an equivalent pay cut when I reduced my hours.
I was only able to make that arrangement after I'd been at the job for a while. When I changed jobs, I went back to five days a week, and I'm definitely missing the long weekends.
> The question is not whether or not you're as productive, but rather, are you more than 80% as productive as you were before.
Absolutely, that was what I was trying to convey (productivity per hour rather than total productivity) but it was poorly worded. A lot of discussion around shortening the work week focuses on the latter. While there may be cases where that's true, I think focusing the discussion on that is wrong because it assumes that there has to be an economic argument for making the change. For me, people having more free time is a positive in itself that society should probably optimise more for.
I am certainly not less productive per hour worked. I might be more productive, I don't know, but that should not be the only reason we contemplate such a change.
Did your salary also drop to 80%? Did other benefits which legally require a 'full time' schedule go away?
The worst possible scenario would be workers switching to shorter work weeks, accepting pay cuts and loss of benefits, and proceeding to be more productive for their employer. I mean, unscrupulous employers would love it, but for society it would be terrible.
Yes, sort of. I approached this during the yearly salary interview. I negotiated a 10% raise, and a change in work schedule to 80%. So I'm getting paid 0.8*base_pay, but I didn't just take sudden a 20% cut between months.
> Did other benefits which legally require a 'full time' schedule go away?
I checked with my union (union membership is mandatory here but they really only negotiate minimum vacation days and minimum salary for a given profession/class, neither of which affects me since I have negotiated above and beyond what they have - it's a very different system than US people are probably familiar with) and according to them, there should be no change to any benefits or legal rights. Things like the fixed christmas bonus will be paid to 80%.
> The worst possible scenario would be workers switching to shorter work weeks, accepting pay cuts and loss of benefits, and proceeding to be more productive for their employer. I mean, unscrupulous employers would love it, but for society it would be terrible.
I'd rather not work more hours than I really want because my employer might benefit from me doing what I want to. If this concerns you, you can just keep your productivity per hour to the same level as it was before. I have no idea if I'm actually more productive, and I don't really care. What matters to me is I now have an extra day every week to do something that I actually want to be doing, rather than working for someone else.
Put another way, if you feel like your skills are undervalued, talk to your employer about a raise. This holds regardless of whether your work proportion is 100% or 80%.
I figured it'd be nice to only ever have two-day work stretches. I didn't put much thought into it, just decided to try it and I've been happy with it so far. I feel a lot more energetic on thursdays and fridays now.
Can't speak for GP, but what I did was move my schedule up to 9:30-6:00 or so, let my arrival date float between 9:30 and 10:00 so I could come in pretty much when I felt like it.
After awhile my workload dropped practically to zero, and I started leaving at 5. Kept it up even when there was a workload, and found that completion times didn't suffer.
Don't propose anything. Just start shifting your schedule around and see if people complain. Do it slowly and people won't notice, or if they do, won't care.
In the corporate world, you don't ask for permission, only forgiveness. The word they use for it is 'initiative'.
I should also note that management is likely to see this not as a wayward employee bucking the rules, but as someone doing what he needs to under the circumstances to make himself happy. So long as it's not egregious and work quality stays ultra-sharp, everybody involved is going to just work around your preferences. They know you'll be much less likely to leave if you're happy with your situation, the damage you cause by leaving is far worse than the damage caused by bucking the standards.
Around the time I was doing this, I got a new manager. I was wholly unwilling to reorient my schedule around his expectations, but I would stay until he left for the first few weeks. One day I followed him out, even though it was at least an hour before I "should" have been leaving. I'd also taken an hour-plus long lunch that day. I told him I usually leave at 5, but I was staying late in case he had any questions for me. He was like, "even though you took a long lunch??" and I just nodded, and followed him out. He didn't mention it again, until I started talking about taking another job.
There is a space in between political expectations, business needs, and personal wishes at any job that is ripe for exploration and exploitation. One can iterate towards their ideal work environment and conditions at any job where their performance is stellar. Just keep the business needs and political expectations in mind and you can practically get away with murder.
I'd be happy to take a 20% pay cut for a 4-day work week at some point in my life. I have a semi-retired relative who does just that.
As it is now, I'm vocal at reviews that I'll take more days off per year in lieu of direct salary increase -- an idea which seems to throw people off and hasn't been seriously entertained. At some point, I'll make enough annually, that I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks.
Corporate pay/work expectations are really odd sometimes.
That's because they know they should just tell you that they don't need to pay you less–you're a salaried employee. Salaried employees get paid a fixed salary to get a job done. The part that employers enjoy in the arrangement is you being able to work more hours to get something done and your compensation remains a fixed cost. What they don't like to talk about is the other side of the coin: It doesn't matter how much time it doesn't take either. So accordingly you should, in theory, be able to work less days if you get your job done in those days.
But the reality is that many managers and employers only support the part that benefits them. Even many of the ones that are supportive of someone taking a Friday off every other week feel that they're doing you a favor or giving you a "perk". At the end of the day your manager has to support it (and if necessary continue believing they're doing you a favor) because they can find a way to shit-can you if you start pushing boundaries they're not comfortable with (in the US).
> ...I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks.
At the risk of sounding too glib, the short answer to why they hate it is it creates work for them. In the US, all of the major payroll processing services are geared towards either hourly or salaried templates. Most companies' payroll procedures are built around the core assumption that if you are salaried, then it is X salary divided across N weeks/months/your-pay-period. If you take days off without pay, changing the salary, someone in payroll has to manually key in the delta off your normal pay period processing numbers. That sometimes has downstream ramifications upon unemployment insurance reporting and remittance, for larger companies there are other regulatory-originated reporting that this can impact, and put in common issues like tax liens and family court-mandated levies, just for starters, and it gets hairy. Generally payroll processing is still built around a set of assumptions that are at odds with emerging knowledge workforce trends; the trends can be accommodated, but it's a hassle.
If you have a good enough relationship with your manager, then you are far better off negotiating a sub-rosa agreement to (in your example) work Wednesday this week and take off a couple days next week (or leave a couple hours earlier each day), and net out to zero change in time worked over a short (sub-month) period and leaving payroll none the wiser to any change in time worked, than making the payroll department perform an exception-based processing of your payroll.
US payroll processing trivia to illustrate how rigid payroll processing systems are today for the small business, and for flexible work arrangements: if you are a really small, micro-sized business, like say an Etsy seller with a couple full-time employees, set up as your own LLC or whatever, you will run payroll, except unlike larger businesses you will frequently want to know how much to pay yourself (after paying off all employees and vendors) including all employER-side tax liabilities, and not just the employEE-side disbursement. All of the top-ten payroll processors have no capability to compute that for you; you have to iterate to an approximation. In other words, if you know you can afford to pay yourself only $10K total this month, payroll processors force you to key in a employEE net pay number then they spit out the gross including the employER side, and only then do you see if you are over/under the $10K amount. There is no feature that lets a small business owner say, this pay period, I can only afford at most $X cash out the door total including all tax liabilities for so-and-so employee, iterate and solve for me what the best result is to achieve that.
US payroll processing can get really complex, really fast even for small businesses, so I can imagine what a nightmare it must be for the designers and developers of those systems. However, I believe there is still plenty of room for someone to create a disruptive service that caters to and appeals to small businesses.
If you are a salaried employee, the only thing payroll should need to know is whether or not you worked at all during the week. If the answer is yes, you get paid your full salary. If it is no, you get paid your full salary if you have a vacation week left. If it is no, and you have no vacation weeks left, you don't get paid. Simple.
If taking a day off during a working week causes them additional effort, it is only because they are grossly abusing the definition of salaried employee the entire remainder of the year.
If they want to handle employees as though they were hourly, they could just stop lying about their people being salaried exempt employees.
If you are salaried, and your manager is fine with you taking Fridays off, payroll does not need to know. If a deadline approaches, and you need to work Saturday and Sunday, too, payroll does not need to know. Salaried workers are supposed to be paid for getting their work done, and not just for punching the clock.
It seems as though many employers are abusing the legal definitions in order to bend labor laws.
> It seems as though many employers are abusing the legal definitions in order to bend labor laws.
This is absolutely what is going on in many US companies, no question. That's a separate can of worms for the political and legislative arenas, and not one that individual salaried employees can safely change on their own within their company. Discussions about this also tend to drag in meta-discussions about compensation, project management, management accounting, work environments, etc., adding more worms to the can, and even more cans of worms to the original can. It's messy.
What you outlined is definitely what should happen. The jobs situation is bad enough for many fields outside of our own, and even many areas within our own field, that flagrant flouting of salaried exempt labor laws is allowed by regulators, and encouraged by shareholders. Longer-term, this only hurts the companies, because they're receiving imperfect signaling of actual required effort, distorting all future projections; competitive advantage accrues to those companies that accurately and precisely calibrate their projections to known required effort. Change will come slowly and haphazardly, if only from the ongoing population growth slowdown, hopefully.
Most likely, but taking into consideration taxes the decrease could be smaller.
Some countries have progressive income tax. So it depends on salary, but it could be that by working 20% less you receive only 15% less.
We have a progressive income tax here. The 20% comes from the part of my salary that gets the higher tax bracket. So in fact the decrease in amount I get paid is quite a bit less than 20%.
I also suggested this change at the yearly salary interview during which I negotiated a 10% raise. So really the amount I get paid each month didn't change all that much.
You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.
I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)
Honestly this seems like the ideal scenario. Full pay, likely no argument from superiors about the amount of work you'd accomplish, and the ability to take long weekend trips without wasting a day or two of PTO.
I only see a few possible downsides:
- Someone expecting you to be in the office and you're not, particularly if they're not familiar with your schedule.
- For developers the same issues with 60+ work weeks often come up in hours 7-10 of a single working day. Off-campus lunch for a full hour (or more) would probably be important, which pushes your full day to 11+ hours.
- Using 10 hours of PTO when you take a day off, but I guess that's what you get for getting the 4-day weekends :)
This is the schedule my father has, working as a mechanic in a power plant. It's pretty solid.
The only (kind of ironic) downside is that holiday weeks are kind of sucky. The holiday day only pays 8 hours, so he ends up having to still work four eight hour days those weeks.
Working 3 10-hour days during a week and 6 5-hour days during a week seems equally doable, but I think I would get more complex, brainy problems solved with the latter, and more simpleminded grunt work done with the former.
I do this every once in a while, and my most productive hours tend to be... the two hours left in my day after everybody else has gone home. The office is silent and there are no distractions or emails. I can just get "in the zone". Maybe I should start doing this more often...
Anecdotal evidence, I used to to that as a CSR at PayPal years ago. After a "normal" day of height hours of calls or emails you had two more hours of emails.
My brain was fried and I was glad when the policy was canceled.
I loved the extra day though (which was Monday or Wednesday) and as a software engineer I would love to pull it off, to rest or work on my own thing, but I would gladly take a pay cut than work 10 hours a day constantly.
I think I conflated your current role as a software engineer with your previous job as a CSR. Besides poor reading comprehension on my part I think assuming a position like CSR is hourly and (typically?) only salaried employees answer emails after they go home contributed to that. Sorry.
It's not working less, some of us need 100% of our pay to get by and can't afford a 20% cut for less work (the stress of having less money > the stress caused by working more)
You propose spend 20% less time working for 20% less pay. He'll probably not accept it too, and if he accepts you'll probably not progress inside that company anymore. But he very probably won't get annoyed either.
I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're already working.
Now, why is this fantasy not a reality? Not because of laws; laws allow this. But:
1) These creative arrangements require non-standard agreements, and a lot of additional bureaucracy, because in a lot of countries, all the bureaucracy machinery allows it, but is really not optimized for use-cases like that.
This can be solved through careful policy work, removing necessary paperwork, streamlining processes, etc.
2) Economies of scale. Having a full-time 40h/week employee that gets X money as salary is cheaper than having 2 half-time 20h/week employees that get X/2 money because of management overhead, cost of their office spaces and other stuff like that.
This would be solved if 20h/week employees would understand this and get X/2-Y money. Also, a lot of these scale issues are being solved by modern world anyway, because we're learning to telecommute, work together in more effective ways, automate management tasks, etc.
3) Culture.
And I think this is the most important one. It's not in the laws, it's in the people's heads. We need to convince people that one person wants to dedicate work 60 hours per week, spend free time that's left on professional education and succeed in his career, and another is quite OK to work for 20 hours per week, get less promotions, learn less new stuff and earn less money, and spend all his free time with his kids. We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure": it's OK to be both of them. And they need to be able to work in the same office, on the same project, fully understanding difference in each other's views and being mutually acceptful.
I don't know how to do that, but it seems that this cultural change is already slowly happening. Still, advancing it would bring the real change much faster and more effectively than writing new laws.
The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.
In France working 35h/week is actually enforced by law. I personally think it's good for productivity (France is still considered a very productive country, more than Germany for instance) but this law remains regularly critiziced. Many want it removed or updated.
It's very hard to measure human productivity unfortunately. It's much easier to measure the cost of an employee working less hours for the same salary.
There's a very weird and irrational belief that more hours on the job means more productivity. Projects are often goal-based now.
But management hasn't entirely caught up with the idea that jobs are no longer about clock punching - and longer clock times can mean less real worker value.
This is partly about power dynamics in the workplace. In many corporations control of time and personal freedom are perks that are only available as you move up the hierarchy. Dysfunctional cultures are much more interested in explicit displays of limited freedom for the worker bees than in true increases in productivity.
Not entirely true (I'm French BTW). In a lot of companies if you're engineer or similar you're "cadre", and not subject to the 35h/week limitation: you have flexible work day hours. There's still a maximum limit, I think you must have at least 10h of rest a day but don't quote me on that one.
To compensate for the more than 35h/week work days you do have more vacation days call RTT for "Reduction du Temps de Travail" (Work Time Reduction). It's about 8 days per years, on top of regular vacations.
Not at all. For gay marriage or pot legalization, large shifts in public opinion have preceded changes to laws.
If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
The Moloch post is excellent, but it doesn't really apply here. Productivity isn't a zero sum game; unless you're in a dysfunctional stack ranking environment like Microsoft used to have, being more productive doesn't hurt your coworkers.
And for tech workers in particular, it's impossible to prevent you from working "off the clock" in your spare time. Yet people generally don't, probably because as others have noted just adding hours doesn't actually make you more productive.
I think the point of the Moloch reference wasn't that individuals would work longer hours, it's that companies that have people who work longer hours will be more successful.
Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
Oh, is that why almost everyone earns minimum wage?
That's exactly why. Because minimum wage puts a floor on the 'bottom' that's being raced to. Otherwise, people would be earning considerably less than the current minimum wage, because the 'bottom' would be even lower.
The question was sarcastic (poor form, I know). More than 90% of workers earn above minimum wage, despite this supposedly inevitable race to the bottom.
> Every full-time job is 40 hours, which is the maximum allowed without having to pay overtime.
Categorically false. I'd wager 90%+ of the (American) readers here are exempt FTEs, meaning they are paid a salary which is based on calendar days/weeks/months/year, not hours worked.
Very few jobs offer 35- or 30-hour weeks (which would still be called full-time). There are part-time jobs that have much shorter hours, or often no contractual hours, but they're a different thing.
Changing the law is not the only thing that would need to be done.
You would also need an executive order to change the way that federal contracts are handled. Currently, huge numbers of salaried professionals employed by contractor companies have to punch the clock as though they were wage-earners in order for the company to get paid for their work.
If you don't log X hours during a given week, your salary for that week may be docked by N/X. If you log more than X, you are not necessarily paid any more for overtime. The contractor-employer could set X to be 40, or 45, or 50--whatever it wants.
If an executive order said that no individual could work more than 30 hours total in any calendar week on any combination of federal contracts, unless that person is paid an additional 10% of their normal weekly salary for each hour in excess of 30 (aka triple-time OT), while the company still gets paid the same rate, then lo, nearly everyone in the military-industrial complex would suddenly have a 30-hour work week.
As it is now, the contracting arrangements dance around the fuzzy edges of labor law, to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of their employers, and possibly also to the benefit of several additional layers of middlemen. Changing the law is meaningless if you can't enforce it.
Education just changes the rules of the game when it comes to working time. In the US, once you have your college degree, you morph from an hourly employee where overtime is paid, to an 'exempt employee' where extra hours are unpaid.
Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.
Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
I'm confused. That proves his point. Every state at a secondary enforcement seat belt law before 1998. Every state aside from Maine and South Dakota (both of which had relatively high seat belt usage before the law) saw an increase in seat belt usage post-law.
I think you might be confused by the 1998 number. That year came after the after law percentage. Meaning that enforcement immediately after the law also worked.
No, the law only brought the 17% of change. The law change is binary and sudden, but the change in culture brought all the rest, gradually, year after year, before law and after.
You are making assumptions based on zero evidence. The change is binary, enforcement is over time. You are assuming the change from 48% to 65% (which is also a 17% increase) can be explained sans law, but there's zero evidence that's the case.
In the interest of not citing 12+ year old studies relying on 17+ year old data, 2013 usage was 87% and since 1995 there have only been two years of decreasing average usage[0], '05-'06 (82-81%) and '10-'11 (85-84%).
To truly see any trend, we would need to look at not just before the law, but many years before the law.
This is one of those sneaky tricks advocates for government intervention use (or fall victim to). To prove the efficacy of OSHA, for example, proponents will show a chart of workplace fatalities or accidents where there are a few or only one data points before the law and then show some spectacular trend that follows after the law was passed. In reality when you go back many more years it is clear the law had little to do with the trend as workplace safety had been increasing for years prior to the law.
Your comment (point 2 especially) reflects the current widespread notion (among employers at least, it seems) that one hour of work is one hour of work, always. I think the main point of the article is exactly to counter that.
> "Productivity – output per working hour – improves with shorter hours."
And why should the employer get all the benefit from this? I think a lot of people would love to work fewer hours, be more productive those hours, if they could retain the same salary.
I would love to, at least, but can't afford reduced pay.
I'm "paid for" 40 hours a week. However since I'm awesome, it takes me only 20-30 hours a week to accomplish more than the output of the younger software developers. Work from home, come in late, come in early, work late, leave early. Doesn't matter, it balances out.
The more I work from home, the greater productivity gains I have over everyone else that remains at the office. It's satisfying.
And I get paid more than them by at least 40%. Go figure.
So sauronlord's reply contributes nothing as an answer to my question about golergka's statement which was: "Thankfully, we don't analytically decide who takes the benefits — labor market is working pretty well at figuring this out."
I'm genuinely curious to know how we would know whether the labor market is working well at figuring this out or not.
Because I know how it compares to planned economy, which was doing it completely awfully in comparison. And in general, by every measure labour markets which have enough volume to regulate themselves fair far better than labour markets that are small or subjected to monopoly from either side.
> I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
We tried asking nicely; employers were abusive arseholes. This is why we can't have nice things.
Without law we see huge rich multinationals forcing people to stay at work but "clocking off" (and thus not getting paid) when things are quiet; or asking for very long hours without sensible overtime.
> I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
> I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach
That's a bit of a "trickle down economics" argument. Depending on corporations and owners to offer an option is never going to be as effective as passing a requirement.
As long as you only care about "effectiveness" of the conversion to smaller working hours — yes. But my point is that we should care about creating an environment where people are actually free to choose how much are they supposed to work.
In other words, you argue of how effective we can be in achieving our goal, while I suggest redefining the goal itself.
We should reduce full time employment to 30 hours.
You'd probably end up with nearly equal productivity for office staff, and you'd generate more jobs for shift based work, as you would need 30% more workers to cover a 5-day period.
This was one of the drivers of the 40-hour workweek -- previously, 12 hour days + saturday work were considered the norm.
> We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure"
It's not about judging employees from a moral standpoint, but getting the most skill and involvement going into your project/company. So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
> So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
It would seem to me that 2 people working 20h/wk offers some significant advantages over one person working 40h/wk.
Firstly, it allows for fail-over; when one person is unable to work (due to holiday or illness, for example) the other might be able to handle 40h/wk for a short period to cover. If one person leaves the company suddenly, it allows for continuity of knowledge while a third person is hired and trained.
Secondly, it allows for variable output; two people can "burst" up to 80h/wk in response to workload, whereas one person would find that very stressful.
Thirdly, multiple people bring multiple points of view, increasing the chances of serendipitous ideas and solutions, and increasing the potential benefit of using people's special skills or experience. Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.
There are some downsides too: The management overhead is higher (equipment, legal, payroll, etc...) and things that were simple when done by a single person are now more complex since there needs to be coordination between multiple people.
To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.
The problems aren't insoluble and don't limit 20h/wk employees to low-importance tasks: Many open source and volunteer projects function perfectly well with many, small, variable inputs from their contributors, many of which will be high-importance.
> To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.
The thing is that, as you noted yourself, the analogy doesn't hold, for people are not AWS servers waiting for charge or failovers. If they chose to work 20h/wk, it's presumably to spend their time for other pursuits, eg. family, and they often won't be able to or won't agree to work more when their employer need it, perhaps unless it is planned well in advance (eg. Black Friday period).
> Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.
Or, as I questioned, you might got two partly focused and perhaps less skilled people thinking about your problem, instead of someone more skilled totally focusing on it. As was brought in another comment, if you got two freelancers, then yeah, you could pick two brains, but if you have two family guys, not so much.
I think the analogy holds for the case of employees not having the capacity to give extra hours due to other commitments. However, I totally agree that people aren't AWS servers, and the reason I felt the analogy was bad was that such a mechanistic view doesn't leave room for the multitude of positive, human ways of working around such problems. For example: if an employer asks a 20h/wk employee to work extra hours, then there can be a negotiation around whether the extra hours can be done at home, flexibly in the evenings, or for a higher hourly rate. In other words, people can compromise and negotiate a settlement which is beneficial for all.
I also don't think it's necessarily true that two part-time people would be less skilled or less focussed on work. It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.
I've worked with many talented and exceptional "family guys" (and family women) who were skilled and totally focussed during working hours. I haven't noticed a correlation between people's priorities outside working hours and ability to do good work.
> It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.
To me, it depends on how you cut the hours, and to what extent. I'm all for working shorter days, eg. 6-8h, 4-5 days a week; however, the more you get close to half-time or below, the more difficult it becomes to stay fully focused and as motivated as a (more) full-time employee. This is admittedly less of a concern if the person uses their free-time on related projects (eg. writing open-source stuff).
> Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
Interesting question. Not necessarily; as a lead developer, I just had an experience of a talented freelancer joining my project for 20 hours per week and helping with issues that we delegated to him so we can fit in the deadline. On one hand, _usually_, 9 women don't make 1 baby in 1 month; on the other hand, in this particular case the freelancer new the technology really well, and we delegated him with special issues that required less knowledge of our whole project and more knowledge of the tech itself.
So — yes, 20h/week limitation creates some problems, when you're working in the 40h/week team, but it's not the end of the world.
Freelancers often work part-time because they are more expensive, so they are not hired full-time, but they generally have many clients in the same week when they can. Moreover, they most often have some expertise in their field, which means they still devote quite a bit of time keeping up to date--they don't just spend their time with the kids. What they can do, though, is taking several months off, either between contracts or when it is ok with their long-time clients.
Anyway, that's a kind of special situation, essentially unrelated to the employee working 20h/wk to take care of their family.
This can be effective in jobs where there is a labor shortage but not a labor surplus.
Meaning, if you are applying for a job that 100 other people are also applying for, you don't get to make these kinds of demands. Whoever is hiring you will simply pass you over.
However if you happen to be working a position requiring skill with a labor shortage (they are having a hard time finding someone qualified to fill the position) then you definitely could be in a position to negotiate for these things.
I think this is why people would be inclined to making it law, there are a lot of jobs where the workers wouldn't have the leverage to affect this kind of change.
Laws are pretty important, actually. IIRC, in Slovenia, if you don't work 40 hour weeks, you'll have issues with retirement (e.g. you'll have to retire later, or your pension would be smaller (regardless of your salary)). I'm assuming there are similar issues with health/social insurance.
I've worked the standard 40-? hr/week programming jobs for years and about a year ago I took on a project where I was the only developer and before I took the job I made the decision to work about 20 hours a week. Turns out that 20 wasn't quite enough so I ended up doing 25-30.
Looking back I think 25-30 hours is about as efficient as I could have been as I gave the best hours of my day. But when it came to the last month before the release I found I did have to give some more time to get it done on time. Short bursts of working long hours seem to be effective for me, but I also noticed that I needed to take some time off after the project.
It's been a great year and I've really enjoyed the other things I was able to do with my time. If you are able it's worth considering even if you take a little less pay.
My circle of friends are what you call professionals. They spend an awful lot of time at work, most of it on looking like they're working.
There's a fair number of jobs where the work itself is not hard or time consuming, but where a culture has grown where everyone needs to justify their position. This skew incentives; if you're a junior, you end up doing a bunch of little things that can pass as a laundry list of things someone had to do. If you're senior, you can gun for getting credit for grandiose sounding things like "strategy". Junior people end up in meetings all day, which if you're senior, you end up calling everyone into. Everyone sits around until late to demonstrate worth.
A lot of these jobs could be done remotely, on any schedule with a sensible number of hours, by just about anyone who can read and write. But because of the culture, they end up being done by the only people who have 100 hours a week, namely singles in their 20s who are just out of university, in some very expensive location. These people then have families to feed and get stuck propagating the same sick culture.
I don't see the law as providing a solution. Nobody enforces the 48 hour contract in Britain. When did you last hear about a City sweatshop being liberated by the police?
The way to change the culture is actually, believe it or not, startups. Yes working hours can be horrible in startups. But in an environment where a lot of firms are startups, there will be more variation in the working culture. Certain firms are already showing the way forward with flexible hours, remote work, and other family friendly practices, without compromising on quality.
>They spend an awful lot of time at work, most of it on looking like they're working.
Guilty. If I could switch to a 4 day work week, I'd get the same amount done, but spend a bit less time on Hacker News and other distractions. Hell, let me work a 2 day week and I'd cut out all distractions to finish what was needed.
I will get the same amount of work done for the same amount of salary, given that my employer has obviously already agreed that it is a fair amount to be compensated for the level and quality of my output.
I'd like to believe this article, and in fact strive myself to reduce my working hours one day and have more time for all that other good stuff the article mentions. Shorter weeks could bring a lot of benefits with them to those who can enjoy them. Some problems I have with the article however:
1. Working less may well not result in getting more (or the same amount) done. The article mentions a correlation between shorter working hours and higher productivity. As always, correlation does not equal causation. Most likely those countries with shorter work weeks are developed countries which have higher output per capita than less developed ones not because working 40 hours a weeks is more productive than working 80, but that utilising a higher level of technology gives superior output.
2. The idea that because the Dutch apparently spend all their free time riding around on bikes means the brits would if given more free time is a joke. We'd spend it doing the things we enjoy (damaging our livers?), not suddenly become some imagined healthier happier version of ourselves.
All in all a pretty poor article I think as a result of the above isssues.
> The article mentions a correlation between shorter working hours and higher productivity. As always, correlation does not equal causation. Most likely those countries with shorter work weeks are developed countries which have higher output per capita than less developed ones not because working 40 hours a weeks is more productive than working 80, but that utilising a higher level of technology gives superior output.
The article is comparing the UK (long working hours, terrible productivity) with Germany (short working hours, very much better productivity).
It's unlikely that there's much difference in the technology available. And they both surely know about all the modern methods of organising a workplace.
I mostly agree with point 2, but
> We'd spend it doing the things we enjoy (damaging our livers?)
Maybe the reason so many british people drink too much is because they're working too much, and they're (mis)using alcohol to wind down.
Purely anecdotal I know, but since giving up my job in the city and going freelance I have indeed spent far less time drinking and far more time exercising.
A quick one after work was far too common. I buckled far too easily to peer pressure and conformity. After all it's the done thing to do right? A crap day at work is solved by a pint (or three) after? And a good day at work... well that could be considerably more ;)
The reduction in hours has allowed me to do activities which overall make me happier and less inclined to drink.
I now do a lot of running and bodyweight fitness. Drinking decreases my performance in those two activities and so I tend not to drink as I get far greater happiness from dropping a second in my minutes per mile than I do from having three pints during the week.
That compares data across the OECD, so fair enough this isn't comparing Papua New Guinea to the UK or similar. However, it mentions in the article the difference between Germany and Greece as examples of higher average hours and lower average productivity. I'd still tend to believe this isn't because the Greeks could get more done by working less but that Germans are tackling different work or using more technology in their work than the Greeks.
> Maybe the reason so many british people drink too much is because they're working too much, and they're (mis)using alcohol to wind down.
Maybe. It seems like we agree on this anyway. I was being slightly tongue in cheek here, not trying to suggest all the freed up hours would be spent in the pub :). I'll leave it at that.
i agree that working less should not always result in getting more done.
one of the potential benefits mentioned by the article is the climate change perspective. from that perspective, the whole point of working less is a mechanism to reduce the rate that stuff gets done.
the downsides of this would be:
1. less stuff gets done
2. on average people have less income
3. on average people have less income, and this hurts poor people far more than wealthy people
4. perhaps the economy doesn't grow, and we don't know how to run society that way
the upsides might be:
5. there's a reduction in negative side effects (both generation of pollution and rate of depletion of non-renewables and unsustainable depletion of renewables (fish stocks, timber, soil, ...))
6. we've got more time to do stuff that isn't work. hurray!
7. we've got more time to think carefully about what we're doing before we hit some hard limit
8. a lot of stuff that gets done is unhelpful, and now there's less of it
9. it's fairly obvious that we cannot keep growing the physical economy indefinitely, it might be a wise idea to try to learn how to run society in a different way before we're forced into collapse.
e.g. see the book "Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet" by Tim Jackson.
Mythical man month actually says the opposite, because even if longer hours have diminishing returns, the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse. Maybe the descrepency here is short view (a couple years to build a startup) vs long view (mature organization over an entire business cycle)
"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated.
It's the unit size that matters. Mythical man month said the ideal basic organization for delivering work output is modeled after a surgical team. If you model after traditional military units, the infantry squad is the equivalent to that team.
Under the mythical man month org structure, the atomic unit of work capacity is that surgical team. You can't do more surgery by putting two more surgeons in the OR. But you can add new teams and get more output. I think the analogy works in the military context as well -- a general doesn't ask for <X> more individual soldiers, he asks for more battalions/regiments/divisions.
Let's remember the context though: That books was about 1960's IBM culture, of legendary stiffness and bureucracy even among contemporary office workplaces, in a project working on a revolutionary mainframe operating system core with innumerable "firsts", in assembly language, at a time where recruits couldn't be expected to have much under their belts.
"Demand is relentlessly rising. Our capacity is not keeping pace. The traditional solution to higher demand has been to invest more time. Unfortunately, time is finite, and most of us have no hours left to invest. Energy, however, can be systematically expanded --- and it can also be regularly renewed. To operate at our best, we need four energy sources: physical (quantity), emotional (quality), mental (focus), and the energy of the human spirit (purpose). This talk will focus on the role of energy in fueling sustainable high performance, and in motivating others."
Totally agree. I don't see how people can be productive working >60h/week and doing mental job. I find 30h/week to be perfect as I can't keep concentrated more than 3-5 hours straight, so that makes two streaks (2-3h) and a coffee break working day Monday till Friday. If I'm forced to work longer hours, I find my mind wandering around, rewritting the same code over and over or reading HN. Of course, there might be some short-term mission critical periods when I can honestly put ~10h/day, but it's an exception that must be justified, not a rule.
>and the Dutch people are better known for their love of cycling
We don't 'love' cycling it's just highly ingrained in our culture and it's way cheaper than owning a car, especially with our awesome public transport.
>But what about tackling the issue at its roots? What if everyone had a shorter working week? We would be healthier and happier, and society would be less unequal and more sustainable.
Is it? How is this article different from pure speculation?
Well, it's not speculation to compare Britain to Denmark, which have comparable living standards, levels of technology, &c but different attitudes to the working week.
No-one in Denmark/Germany is a slacker, btw. They're just really productive when they're actually at work.
During the Great Depression most people were smart enough to know that reducing hours, without reducing pay, was a good strategy for lowering unemployment.
Of course, capitalists tend to dislike the idea of lowering hours this way. For them, it amounts to a reduction in profit.
If hours are lowered, capitalists will presumably then invest to improve productivity so that the same output can be produced in fewer hours. When they succeed, their rate of profit improves.
Increased productivity without vast new markets opening up means that, in turn, unemployment will again rise.
So there is a virtuous cycle: Cut the work week without cutting wages. Wait for productivity to catch up. Cut the work week again.
If we had an aggressive policy of cutting hours whenever unemployment is too high, and we do this across the board for all sectors, perhaps before long farms will be more fully worked by robots, and so on.
The author of the article wrote: "John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s that by about now, we would all be working a mere 15 hours a week."
Keynes did but it was Marx and Engels who predicted in the 19th century that we'd have to fight for hours reduction every step of the way.
I signed up for a gym that apparently went on an initiative to improve its employee culture. The gym is really nice, not as good as Equinox in Palo Alto, but close enough. So one of the initiatives was to close the gym during holiday seasons so that staff could enjoy vacations schedules just like everyone else. Lo and behold, they closed the gym between December 20 and January 5th. Just when I was planning to catch up on things. They can count on my cancellation. What I'm saying - do you want to live in a world that is functioning 80% of time?
We should respect other people's time off if we want others to respect our time off. Is it really so hard to find some other way to exercise for a month?
Why not close supermarkets out of respect for labor unions as well, for 2 weeks. I think the solution lies somewhere else - such as automating humans out of retail and services to the extent possible. For instance, speaking of gym, I would keep the facility open staffed just with with security and reception. Shut down non-core functions: new member office, group sessions, cafe etc.
One irony here is that of the two gyms I belong to, the cheap one has longer hours on holidays and Fridays.
I originally added the cheap one because it's just 4 minutes from my house, ruining my ability to flake out on the basis that "I don't have time to do X before they close".
If you need your business to be open for the same amount of time, reducing maximum hours to 3/4 means increasing worker count to 4/3.
Judging by the abysmal labor participation rate and unemployment stats in the US, this is easily done. Per-worker overhead costs would force an increase in the labor budget for most companies, though.
As many businesses have been ruthlessly slashing that budget category for a while, that is likely to prompt a lot of bitching and moaning from company management--even from businesses that depend on consumers being able to afford their products.
It's just a scheduling problem. If a business elects to be open longer than 6 hours per weekday, it will need to have some workers work at different times than others. But I do recall visiting the government license office once on my lunch break, only to discover that most of the workers there were also out to lunch, and took more time out of the middle of the day than I wanted to.
So, anecdotally, whether or not the world functions when you need it to function depends more on how much the business cares about serving its customers than the number of hours its workers are on-site every day.
I cut my hours down to around 35 a year ago. The reduced stress made me more productive than when I was working 40 hours. If I thought I could get away with chopping it down to 15 hours I would. I don't have a high enough workload to get into flow state most days. Chopping the week down would both make me more productive and allow me to enjoy work even more. But actual tasks don't come in very frequently.
Suggestion for people wanting to work a shorter week:
Ask you HR department for an employee handbook and read it carefully. I did this in the 1970s (worked for a large defense contractor) and discovered that I only had to work 30 hours a week to get full benefits. Much to the unhappiness of my bosses and coworkers, I "gave myself a 20%" cut in pay and stopped working on Mondays.
I tried to be a perfect employee the four days a week that I worked to make up for inconvenience to my bosses and coworkers.
I was able to work four days a week in most companies I have worked for, spanning about 50 years.
One advantage of part time work is that it gave me extra time to write computer science books and spend extra time with friends and family. But, I left a lot of money on the table taking a 20% pay cut.
It seems to me that the spirit of long working hours stems from the idea that a worker is an interchangeable 'machine' with a capacity to provide effort and the idea that more time spent (literally) at the coal face will yield a better return on capital.
This holds true in an industrial context where there is a large pool of workers, the work is low skilled and unions are weak. A workers ability to provide time is the only concern that the employer has. Where I live, in the North of England, this factory mentality still casts a long shadow over working conditions and practice.
I think a 40 hour week is way too long to actually have a balanced life and I've consistently burnt-out where the pressure to work 50/60 hours a week is strong.
I'm not surprised that DavCam is wanting to keep the 48-hour opt-out - if you are an investor / owner of capital, do you care about the long term well being of the people making effort to give a return on your capital over a short term (5 years) when people are interchangeable? You simply want to increase the return on your investment.
I'm annoyed that it said the "Most Voted" before I even had the chance to look at the options. That immediately tainted my ability for an unbiased response.
The article makes the fundamental error of assuming that if you worked ten hours less, someone else would get to work ten hours more. But other than that, it's a pretty good article grounded in actual fact.
Yes, it would only work in sectors where the labor is more or less fungible, but these types of articles always seem to overgeneralize the effectiveness of reduced work hours.
That working fewer hours ==> increased productivity is also a mathematical tautology. Productivity being a function of output and hours, with output generally being somewhat sticky as hours change.
I think your definition of productivity is off a bit. You need to account for "effective" productivity. My hours might be 40+ but how many of those are truly focused and productive?
Hence, working less time with (theoretically) better focus and reduced stress/strain would be more productive.
It's not my definition, but an econo-bs definition that involves aggregating $ value output, hours worked. So any study that discusses productivity will always find, at least over any short period, that hours are inverse to productivity as they cannot move in perfect lockstep. However, as an individual, your experience may (and probably should) vary quite a bit from what you might predict in the aggregate!
Not even going to read the article. Doesn't this seem like a "no shit" type of thing. Lest time in the day to get things done so you work faster/harder. Of course you're more productive. I did get a good laugh though since I started this job 4 months ago and literally do 30 min a work a day and fuck off for the rest of the day. I'm now spending my day getting paid to think of others ways to make money online. Haven't came up with anything good yet.
As would getting rid of open floor plan workspaces, or, even better, working from home.
How long until people figure out that business folks really sincerely do not care about productivity? If it would require them to alter their traditional ideas of what the workplace should be like (derived from labor-intensive manufacturing in the first part of the 20th century), the psychological cost is one they are not willing or able to incur.
Most conversations about working fewer hours are really conversations about how much the personal resources of workers can be drawn upon without providing extra pay before there are negative productivity consequences. This article ties in directly with some ideas I've been exploring recently [0] involving personal resources of workers and time/productivity management of workers [1][2]. The concepts of worker personal resource management and worker time management are largely foreign to the places I've worked, much to their detriment. Instead, the strategy could be described as "colloquial management", a mishmash of half-remembered concepts from business school or worse, the playground.
If a worker can quantify roughly how much time and energy each task at work will take up, a clearer picture of how to be the most productive in the least amount of time will reveal itself. Employers perpetually hide in the ambiguity of the employees' time and effort, hoping to make a profit out of asking for too much and motivate their workforce by periodically throwing a tiny bone to the most masochistic over-achiever. A tabulated rubric describing to the employer exactly how much time is spent on each task and how much mental and physical energy the task takes relative to the worker's actual capacity for these energies would show exactly how wasteful it is to over-work people.
Longer hours deplete worker mental energy and physical energy resources whether or not there is more work being done. Once these resources are depleted, worker efficiency drops precipitously. Additionally, periodically depleting these resources leads to worker burnout. I also suspect that workers resent longer hours whether or not they are necessary, leading to weakened ability to refill their mental energy reservoir due to poorer mental health in general.
> Productivity – output per working hour – improves with shorter hours.
Yes, but total output = number of hours x productivity. So even while productivity diminishes, your total output can increase if you increase number of hours.
I would love to work in an environment where I can work at my top productivity 12 hours a day for a couple weeks (including weekends). Then I need to not do anything for a few weeks.
If you have to have your bum in the seat for 40+ hours/week to get paid, why would you bother? The "bullshit" gives you something to do when you're too tired to be actually productive.
If your inbox is full of bullshit, try taking proactive steps to clear it out. If it's a waste of corporate time, you have a basic professional responsibility to do so.
If you fail, it is likely because it wasn't as bullshit as you thought. The cogs may be sexy and obviously doing work, but the grease turns out to be vital too. But my "if" isn't for mere rhetoric... you may well succeed, because bullshit does build up too. The only way to find out is to try. I've had it go both ways.
The climate change argument is a terrible one. Lower consumption? In the same article it argues that the work would be spread over more people. So, using the article's logic, same amount of productivity, more people providing it. For 50 hours of work, you deploy 2 people, thus causing 2 units of fixed costs to be incurred for the same productivity. Same variable costs, twice the fixed cost.
I think one of the problems is that some people in powerful positions in companies want to do long hours themselves, so expect those under them to do the same. They see someone putting in long hours as hard-working and diligent, even though in reality they are probably being very inefficient and producing shoddy work.
Until we have control over land prices via land value tax we will always work a full week.
Land prices are set by credit which will expand to fill all labour less food / heating costs.
Only when land is cheaper can we opt out of working 40 hours and this will see a general reduction in the average working week. Until then we are all banker bitches.
