That was one of the central theses of David Graeber's famous "bullshit jobs" essay, which is now a book (haven't read yet.) Keynes et al. predicted declining work hours. Graeber says not only do most people barely work during their 40 hours, many entire jobs or entire departments are basically... well, bullshit.
CREATE TABLE widgets (
id SERIAL,
name VARCHAR NOT NULL
);
CREATE INDEX widgets_idx_id ON widgets (id);
into migrations/42-add_widgets.sql, tapping Melissa[0] on the shoulder and asking her to review it, then SSHing into staging and executing it, all in the space of about twenty minutes with zero paperwork other than a PR.
This has been a longstanding theory of mine. The brain is lazy and doesn't like to think - people sometimes miss manual labor because you don't have to spend too much time thinking since at some point it becomes rote.
Every once in a while I pine for jobs I had before I was an engineer because the stakes were low and I never had to give work a single thought while I was off the clock. Ultimately I think I'm happier as an engineer (at least at my current job) but I still miss it sometimes.
I miss my old restaurant jobs- not because the stakes were low, but because the requirements were all well-defined. I knew when I was doing a good job because everything was running smoothly, and then I got to go home and screw around. Being tired didn't make work that much worse because it was easy to get into a flow state.
Compare that to current job- must maintain several projects, all of which are constantly changing scope, while leveraging soft skills and playing office politics, while worrying about career development...
Unless you're carrying a pager, as an engineer you don't really need to think about work when you're off the clock. Culturally this tends to happen a lot, but it's not mandatory.
I don't mean that I _have_ to think about it, it's more that any problems that existed at the end of the day will exist the next day. There's no reset because there's no second shift coming in after me. That causes me to think about the problem, at least subconsciously, until I can fix it.
When I worked in food service, any problem that came up that wasn't solved when my shift ended, would likely still be fixed by the time I worked next.
I have had both Engineering jobs that would force me to be always on and other engineering jobs in which I would completely disconnect as soon as I leave at 5PM.
The ones in which you fully disconnect are so good for your private life. You leave the office and don't even think about opening the work laptop anymore, that's something special.
I wish we could concentrate our effort at work and be allowed to work less hours for the same pay and output but companies pay for your availability not for your output so never gonna happen.
Right. But the tough part is most of the workers have internalized that low level of cadence and focus. For that archetypical person, if you cut their work week from 40 hours to 20 hours, their actual output would probably fall to the equivalent of 10 hours.
How did you manage this? I currently work 80%, but I don't see a super-viable pathway to go down to 60%. You work three days a week or what? (Mostly four days a week in my case, with some additional days taken as holiday).
I work 5 hours per day, with 4 hours on Fridays. We did it so I can work on a side-project (writing a book) and so our boy don't have too long days at kindergarten.
We do live in a small village where our cost of living is quite low. I also work remotely and keep a fairly good salary comparatively, so it all works out well.
Yes I believe we are all partially wasting our time. Unfortunately it is one of the pillars of our societies and it would be extremely or almost impossible to change. People expect to be busy at work 5 days a week for 8 hours.
