"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, "
an odd source, but OK.
I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty anymore but my daughter still sings Frere Jacque as "Something's broken Something's broken It's your fault!, It's your fault!" I spent half my life on pagerduty (so over half my life - waking and asleep, working in some sort of fashion).
It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment (and sleeping, if you count on-call).
Combine this with the nagging suspicion that none of this actually matters (See "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber) and burnout, detachment, etc. shouldn't be a surprise.
I work remotely, and absolutely work off-hours, weekend hours, and some holiday hours. I also take long lunches on weekdays, sleep in if I feel like it, go out on long walks when I need a break, and just stop working mid afternoon if I'm not in the zone. Overall, it balances out. I work when I am productive, usually right around 40 hours a week.
But I can see why people would think I'm working extra hours if all they are looking at is my Slack availability. The connectivity of my devices !== whether or not I'm actually going to respond if you send me a message.
I'm kind of in the same spot. But while it feels like freedom to do the things you mentioned (go on long walks, stop working mid afternoon, etc...), in the end our lives revolve around work and not the other way around. I'm struggling with this as breaks aside, there are other things I like to do in life.
You are correct. But working 9-5 in an office doesn't change that. Your work schedule still dictates the broad strokes of your personal schedule, whether you can travel, and such things. Even the concept of "the weekend" exists solely because of work schedules.
Figuring out how to disconnect from work and use the 8 hours of your day that aren't working or sleeping to pursue personal interests is important. The exact answer of how to do that differs between people. But it is a goal worth pursuing.
I think I'm somewhat in the same pattern. My background is that I quit my position as a team lead because I wasn't happy with the day-to-day experience. Now I work for myself (consulting, remote contract work) and I'm much happier. Establishing good practices with my clients has been key, and it makes me realize as an employee, I didn't have the right leverage to work effectively with my employer.
I work remotely as well and I observe that a lot of people are available outside their regular working hours. I think remote work is part of the problem: the additional blurring between work and life will askew your work life balance.
Pager duty can burn you out, but it really depends on how much you get paged and how many people are on rotation.
Overtime would be a lot easier to swallow if you were paid, say, time and a half for weekday overtime and double for weekends or holidays. But, no, most tech employees aren't paid anything extra for it, so management has no incentive to reduce the amount of overtime you actually work.
I had one boss who acted very concerned and would keep telling me not to work so late. But at the same time he wanted the same amount of work done, which meant working overtime. When I finally did stop working as much overtime, he was disappointed that I wasn't getting as much work done, and my reviews suffered.
Also, commuting time should be paid as work time. There are so many people with crazy commutes that don't get paid a dime for it. I seem to recall that some European country had in fact required companies to pay for their employees' commutes. The US should follow suit.
I believe the case in question was about a pretty narrow situation - travel nurses whose last case of the day took them particularly far from home, or something like that. It's not as simple as clocking in when you leave for work.
> Also, commuting time should be paid as work time.
I can earn more, without working more, simply by living somewhere cheaper and sitting down in a comfortable car for longer? And I don't have to be an Uber driver dealing with the general public? And if I drive slower, I "earn" more? Sign me up!
(Preferably with a self-driving RV, where I can safely be in the back while it's moving, of course).
> Also, commuting time should be paid as work time. There are so many people with crazy commutes that don't get paid a dime for it. I seem to recall that some European country had in fact required companies to pay for their employees' commutes. The US should follow suit.
Yes, we need more discrimination against poor people who can’t afford to live near job centers.
If an employer has to pay someone more if they live further away, then someone who lives closer is a preferable candidate for the job. So a person who was born into a family that already lives near offices or city centers has an advantage over someone who was born further away (typically lower cost of living areas).
Flipside: worker's noncompensated contributions to employment aren't free.
Ulitmately, labour benefits the business, and surplus accrues to the business. Changing costs mean a shifting balance of inputs (labour, capital). But if your firm isn't profitable whilst paying a living and sustaining wage to its workers, then what exists isn't a profit-making enterprise, but a charity, on behalf of the owners, subsidised by the workers.
There's no law that says a non-viable business has a right to continue operations.
Very true, though the flip side of this as that some of us take advantage of remote work to have more flexible lives.
For example, yesterday I had a block of deep work scheduled for the afternoon but wasn't really feeling it. So I went on a long hike instead, came home, and worked from 6-9.
I'd need outrageous amounts of money (even for tech) to consider pager duty though, it sounds hellish.
>Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues
I work for a startup in a customer facing role and if I'm not on the schedule I simply don't get called. The Jewish person is the primary contact on the days around Christmas and the non-Americans take Thanksgiving and the 4th of July (and the boring old Christmas-celebrating Americans cover the holidays that they want to take vacation around, everyone wins). I work 40hr/wk and up to two weekend nights per month (off hours production stuff). I used to work for BigCos and it was even easier, thanks to being global we had people everywhere and nobody ever needed to be woken up unless they were the owner of something broken in production.
Every previous job has been reasonable like this. No employer I have ever encountered expects more than 40hr unless it's specifically negotiated. I know of one person that works 60+hr weeks but he works in education and voluntarily leads an extracurricular he is very passionate about.
Of course my experience is anecdotal and I know there exist 60hr/week sweatshops but for white collar employees they don't seem to be the norm, at least in tech in my region.
> It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment
If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats...
Given the nearly 100% rate of this for all of history, it seems weird to argue that the current -- much lower -- rate is too high.
You mean emergencies such as your hot shot boss calling you 2am because he wants to discuss some bullshit idea he just had?
I’ve worked in a couple of places where this kept happening. First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. Everyone understand: this is not normal. Unless you specifically signed up for pager duty sort of job, no one should put up with this.
> First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it.
I think that's the game at a lot of companies, to just prey on the young and hungry who probably don't know any better and are more likely to put up with bullshit like that.
As a fully formed adult with responsibilities and kids. There are so many job posts you can tell right away aren't for a certain demographic. People who may push back because they have a parent-teacher conference on the schedule already.
How do you say the current rate is much lower? By your definiton everyone on Earth still is at work to respond to their home being set on fire, but now many people are also on call to respond to a shopping website being mildly inconveniently down at a time most people are asleep, in a system which is abusively, inhumanely, choosing to define that as an "emergency" and choosing to make that happen as often as possible by squeezing design and engineering and planning resources, because both of those choices (uptime, and fast development) are more profitable, and screw the human factor.
It's a totally different scenario.
Even in situations where there are lives at risk, medical systems, or power grid control, there are plenty of options for planning in advance, for redundancy, for employing people in different time zones. When a peasant has to respond to their house burning, they're motivated to put the candles out before going to bed. When a peasant has to respond to their email system being down, but they're not allowed to allocate more time or money to fix it, that's worse.
There's something to what you say. If you're responsible for handling emergencies then you have some incentive for making sure such emergencies don't happen. Thus, developers have incentives to write more robust code and sysadmins have incentives to design more robust systems.
But what if your company doesn't give the resources you need to make these more robust? Your team may be too small to do much other than run from one fire to another, or to apply a bandaid fix rather than taking the time to do things right from the start. It's also not uncommon to come in to a company inheriting an unholy mess of spaghetti code which no one at the company fully understands nor has the time to document, redesign, or fix.
In these cases emergencies tend to be a regular occurrence, and arguably of the company's own making, but the hands of the people who have to respond to them are effectively tied.
Given that chauffeuring is driving and we were driving before Uber existed, it seems strange that people expect compensation when driving for Uber and count it as part of their labor time?
Try to make the correspondences in your supposed analogy explicit. I'll wait.
My parent comment is not complaining about excessive labor time. He's complaining about being on call. Is it strange that people expect compensation for being on call? That depends on what you're willing to consider "compensation". No one is clocked in at an hourly rate while on call because the labor laws prohibit that, but that's an artifact. On-call positions are viewed as more undesirable than otherwise and pay compensation accordingly.
We all have personal lives where we do things employers would pay for. It doesn't follow from that that employers demanding constant availability is nothing new, we still have those personal lives, so this isn't a swap of fungible work. Even if it were, we aren't required to deal with professional bullshit in personal driving or family emergencies.
Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars).
Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.
Also looking for a new job in a pain in the ass. First, you have to make or update your resume... which for me is like facing all of my self-hatred. As I make my resume, I spend hours trying not to feel shitty about all the things that I haven't accomplished, and feel shitty about how I don't really have the requirements for the job I want. I compare myself to everybody else in the field as I look for example resumes, realize I don't have the same kinds of accomplishments, and I have just been grinding away for the past 10 years. All this is despite the fact that I know I'm good at my job, and I've never been reprimanded or fired.
Then, I get so sick of going to 6-hour interviews where you go with each member of the team one-on-one. Then wait weeks, get a call back to come in again... Take more time off the current job, lie to your boss again... Spend an hour each time figuring out how to get there and park, and find your way around the completely unmarked campus... Then half the people apologize that they forgot you were coming. Study before hand, writing cover letters, tweaking the resume for each job... I get sick of answering the same questions over and over, when we could have just had a group interview and gotten it over with.
And if you're quitting because you're stressed and burnt out, last thing you want is another thing on your plate to be stressed and burnt out about.
Totally different perspective from mine, but certainly valid. If you're familiar with spoon theory, the spoons you spend just working are spoons you need in order to look for a new job.
I agree on the health care aspect but in addition I think people stay at these jobs because it is the norm. The grass is not assumed to be greener on the other side. We will leave a job for more money but we assume it will come with the same soul crushing workload and nonsense.
Employee provided health insurance guarantees cheap labor and easy to abuse employees who must make a very hard choice if they are to lose health insurance.
Who would lobby for changing that balance and who would finance the campaigns of politicians that support such a reform?
yeah but only they can write the law and nominate judges to enforce it.
IMO getting rid of the tax subsidy for employer sponsored insurance, enforcing anti-trust law on health providers (insurance, hospitals, etc.) by forcing them to disclose prices and getting rid of onerous licensing regulations will achieve the intended decoupling between health insurance and employment.
Which is indeed very hopeful. The level of institutionalized corruption including in how money selects who appears on ballots makes this a difficult process.
This is a great reminder of the root issues we need to deal with.
Be careful what you wish for here. Since Obamacare, most white collar workers will admit that their insurance is worse and simultaneously more expensive. That's to be expected, because those who pay insurance and are healthy are now paying for many people who previously had less of a safety net. No free lunch and all.
Obamacare has twisted some of the incentives of actually working, though. Many of us in groups like /r/financialindependence have calculated that it is now to our advantage to eventually quit work altogether, structure our investments and distributions to ensure we are right below the line where subsidies (from those who continue to work) will pay our way, while we just exit the game itself.
It will do nothing but screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, who have many dollars hoarded away, but refuse to be forced to work for everyone else any longer without the extra renumeration that is now sucked out by the government. And this is one of the problems with socialism.
If things move to a single payer social system under a Warren or Sanders presidency, I'd probably quit my job tomorrow. Those who continue to play the game will be working more and more for less and less.
Bingo. The problem with healthcare-for-all is it's impossible to pay for without raising taxes across the board eventually, regardless of how much the candidates swear that it won't, and the voters know it. If you want European-style healthcare systems, you'll need European-level taxation.
(This is also why UBI won't ever get off the ground; voters aren't stupid. All that money has got to come from somewhere.)
Raising taxes while eliminating healthcare premiums.
Replacing a system designed to extract as much as possible from people needing medical help in order to enrich corporations with a system optimized for cost and efficiency.
Insurance is already based on paying for other people’s expenses except that it’s optimized for the profit of the ones running the scheme.
So how do we pay for Medicare for all?
We take 80% of the money, return it to the payers, and pay with the rest, in the form of taxes.
I wouldn’t mind a slight increase in taxes in exchange of knowing that I and nobody else has to ever be afraid to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.
Ambulance rides don’t need to cost $3000, or a night at the hospital $1000.
Once we have one huge entity to negotiate pricing for everyone (about the only thing insurance companies have going on for them), we won’t have to be paying 10x to 100x what the services cost to provide.
Or should we continue sacrificing human lives and health to the altar of quarterly profits for a handful of people?
Healthcare is a solved problem in all first world countries. Trying to spin it into something else is insulting.
People are not stupid and propaganda has its limits.
That's to be expected, because those who pay insurance and are healthy are now paying for many people who previously had less of a safety net. No free lunch and all.
Not necessarily to be expected, part of the goal of access to healthcare for all is that people can get treatment sooner, before problems get so bad, and get healthier, sooner. Over time if that was effective, medical costs would trend down. America doesn't seem to do that, paying more for the same treatment than other countries, but high healthcare costs are not caused by workers paying them.
But let's say that is expected, healthy people are now paying more to cover the needy. It's a kind of forced charity, and there are good reasons for personally disliking being forced to cover others expenses, sure.
But then your answer to this is to quit your job, and live off your investments? "Making your money work for you" is a polite way of saying "live off the work of others". The dividends and investment growth in that lifestyle come directly from the work done by the still-employed. Your future dream life will send you in the direction of being a shareholder squeezing and extract maximum money from the still-employed, because your survival depends on their work. In a world where everyone saved for financial independence and the pool of workers was ever shrinking, your income would dry up, so the incentives will be upon you to stop the still-employed from doing do what you did - pulling up the ladder after you.
That is, while it won't be outright legislated in a single bill in plain terms like Obamacare was, you will be all-but mandating that other people work to keep you alive, or supporting systems and legislation which has that effect. The very thing you are complaining about, being forced to help others, in your opening paragraph, will still be a system you take part in and support. You're saying "if I am compelled to pay for others, that's evil Socialism" and "if others are working themselves ragged supporting me that's great, self-interest individualism at its best".
screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, [..] while we just exit the game itself.
You aren't exiting the game. You can never exit. The moral answer is to not be the leech you think is so deplorable, and keep working to keep yourself alive. When you can survive on your savings without growth beyond inflation, without dividends, and with spending the principle, then maybe retire. If everyone pitches in, with more people working, there won't need to be screwed over employees working themselves ragged. That ought to benefit society collectively, which will benefit you in roundabout ways.
Most companies would love to do away with the expense of health insurance and all of the administrative headaches and costs that come with it. But since most full-time white collar jobs offer health insurance, changing jobs might change your coverage some but won't leave you insuranceless. Now if you want to go out on your own or create/work at a startup, health insurance can be a big issue.
Big companies already have the HR staff to deal with health insurance. It’s in their interest to keep health insurance tied up with employment, as it gives them an advantage over small business and individuals, because individuals who work for small businesses that don’t offer health insurance have to pay for it with post tax dollars.
edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
Why should people who work support those who choose not tow work (as opposed to people who cannot work)?
Work is an important value. Whatever economic viability the U.S. has to experiment with weird social ideas, it's because of generations of people who believed in work as a moral imperative.
This is the trap of equating "work" with "make money". Not all work is economically lucrative, even if it may provide real human value. Consider artists, for example. The arts don't pay very well, to the point that lots of people who would like to be full time professionals cannot afford to do so. But it adds tremendously to our social wealth.
Like anything else, some art does, lots probably doesn't. And how do we decide what is bringing us value? Which art should be promoted and which is just a scam, a big pile of poop put in a mason jar?
We circle right back to capitalism. Giving the populace a mechanism to vote for what has value and what doesn't. Money. Attention. Time. Esteem. Fame.
Capitalism has a built-in failure mode. As Peter Thiel (not exactly a commie, him) points out, capitalism only functions in its failure mode. The ideal world that all the economists and conservative politicians argue for, where pure competition sets the price, is a race to zero. In ideal capitalism, profit is impossible. Profit only happens where there is friction that prevents the market from working fully.
Friction isn't necessarily innovation. When you pay $6 to get popcorn at a movie, it's not because they've created better popcorn. It's because they've created a local monopoly where you have no choice but $6 popcorn or nothing.
Really, the vast majority of profit is from non-innovative friction.
And yet advertising works. If we really believed people have free choice, there would be no uproar about Russian interference in elections, or political advertising on Facebook and Twitter, because it wouldn't sway people's behaviour in any way. Certainly you aren't ordered around in total, but you are a finite amount of brainpower with well known biases and failure modes, and Capitalism is rewarding those who exploit them and condition people's behaviour most effectively.
I'd like to see a source for "It is already economically viable...". Maybe at current levels of production, but you can't just assume current levels of output in every sector while removing incentives.
Why do you think incentives are removed? Is "work or starve" the only incentive?
I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
Have you tried purchasing health care before? It's not inexpensive. There's no way we could guarantee food, health care, and housing for everybody with no work requirement. Only a really stupid person would believe this could work.
Money is an artificial construct used by humans to facilitate trading their labor amongst each other in order to get what they need to survive.
Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.
People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.
The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.
If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.
I think maybe they're suggesting that if you choose to work then you could better your life. If you chose not to work, you'd have some fairly modest no-frills lifestyle. There'd still be a strong incentive to work, but less intense pressure to always be employed. I feel like many people are in a situation where they need to have a job so they end up staying in jobs that they consider BS jobs just for that paycheck.
I think it'd be nice to have the option to not work, because then people could take risks and pursue things they otherwise couldn't... I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job. However if we could take a lifestyle hit (but still survive) and I could try out some business ideas or other career options that I've been thinking about maybe society as a whole could be better off.
I can't say I've thought this through entirely, but it's certainly an idea that intrigues me.
I agree with everything you have said, as well as everything the OP said. I just think we do need to really sit down and figure out the 'basics' of a UBI. I really like the concept of the Yang style $1,000 UBI as a starting point to essentially take the edge off of basic existence.
"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.
Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway?
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
Considering most farm workers are unskilled laborers making at or close to minimum wage, why would they work if they could get a UBI that covers all their needs? Farmers would still farm but that's because they own the land and directly benefit from it, they would not be able to perform all of the unskilled labor on their own. This could perhaps be offset if we drastically changed our guest worker program to allow unskilled labor in from other countries but it would have to be setup in a manner that denies these workers a UBI, otherwise they too would not work.
Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.
Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.
They will need to raise wages above what UBI offers (which will be subsistence level to begin with, likely lower than the current minimum wage) or else offer other benefits.
If "they do it only for the paycheck" is necessary for important work, how is it different from slavery? How are we not being coerced to do things that are, at the very least, unpleasant, for the majority of our waking hours?
You wind up in a world where freedom vs slavery is a distinction without a difference.
Have you ever fed yourself completely from your own garden? That is very hard, back-breaking, dangerous (if you use machinery) work (albeit definitely rewarding). My grandfather was a dairy farmer and was missing part of a finger, knew more than one person who rolled a tractor, and at least one person who was pulled into a hay bailer.
I’d wager the marginal returns from moving beyond feeding yourself for free to feeding a nation are slim, to none, and very likely negative.
Hobbies are intrinsically rewarding. Once you do it enough, it becomes monotonous. I don't think roofing a house or plowing a field is intrinsically rewarding past the fist few times.
Which is odd, given that we produce more stuff than ever before.
We have a couple of problems - a lot of the things we need most (dedicated time from doctors, teachers, etc.) are affected by Baumol's cost disease and in other categories, like housing, we have legally mandated shortages (it's illegal to create enough homes near transit, amenities, and jobs) so we will, by definition, never have enough.
Doctors also have legally mandated shortages, yes. And cost disease is a characteristic of a system not really something you can treat while retaining the other constraints (no homes, guaranteed pension returns, restrictions on number of workers, etc.)
A year ago I had a 6-week paternity leave at 33 years old. It was the first time since I started my career that I was able to unplug for a significant amount of time.
This time off was truly a magical time for me, and even though I had to do a ton of work around the house and with the baby, I felt a sense of purpose. I started to feel like a real person again.
I came back to work and I made some huge gains for the company for a short period of time... my creativity was back, my motivation was back. The things I did after paternity leave paid off a huge amount and had ripple effects of increased productivity for the entire company.
Then, I burned out again. Now I'm just a zombie who occasionally writes code and counts down the hours until I can go home. It's obvious to me that I just need some extended time to myself, but that doesn't fly in America. I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge.
I worked at a satellite office of a medium software company. A fellow programmer asked for more time off instead of pay raises. He was put on a shitlist for even making that request.
The company HQ was in a college town where there was no comparable employer for developers, but our satellite office was in a bigger city. Startups here starting offering 4 weeks vacation as a sign-on enticement. My coworker came back to management with this counter-offer and was told go to Hell. So he took the other offer and left.
One by one, EVERY developer in our satellite office got the same offer, came to our management to ask if they'd match or at least increase the amount of vacation, and all got told to piss off. One by one we watched ALL of our development staff (at the satellite office) leave and not get replaced (interviewees ended up going to the startups offering more leave).
Management (at corporate HQ) demonstrated they would rather ride that sinking ship to the sea bottom than budge on not giving more vacation.
Why?
Because there was a vesting schedule for earning leave, 10 days/yr first 6 years, 15 days/yr 6-12 years, 20 days/yr after 12 years. If they let recent hires jump right to 20 days/yr that's manager compensation territory AND it would invalidate the years those with 11 had been waiting.
(You might think the silver lining is all the new companies without similar hangups employing the programmers who left; unfortunately AFAIK all of those startups folded in the couple years since then.)
> don't think you can even ask your employer about this
I wonder how much of that is in our own minds, though - my boss is a pretty cool Chinese guy, and I tell him I need time off to deal with something, he says no problem, let me know when you’re back. But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody.
> But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody.
Does "everybody" include you, too, by the way? Are you actually just judging yourself for taking time off, and assuming everyone else is?
Do you judge others for taking time off too?
I don't have an agenda here, really, except the point out that this being "in our own minds" is not that different from "assumptions that come from our culture"...
Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done.
And once you have been in that machine for a while taking a little time off feels scary and unfamiliar.
I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less.
Your general position that Americans often don't get a lot of vacation time by the norms of developed countries isn't wrong, but your choice of data is.
That table is 23 years out of date, and it was only for employees at "small private establishments", which generally means <100 employees in BLS terminology. They generally provide less vacation time than the overall average of employers.
---------
As of 2017, the average in the US is around 15 days after 5 years, 17 days after 10 years, and 20 days after 20 years.
Also, to note the obvious: The norms for your average HN reader in terms of benefits are likely to be different (better) from the average person in society. I would consider 15 days to be an "only" in the part of the job market I am in.
Something can be both average (relative to a population) and low (in an absolute sense). 15 days of holiday per year seems like a great example of this.
Indeed - this is a fantastic argument in favour of emigrating. It's also the cause of friction in multinationals operating in Europe - I was saddened when, upon starting at my "unlimited PTO" employer, they had an internal doc that this really meant "3-4 weeks" (note that 4 weeks is the legal minimum in the EU)
I get 15 at low tenure. But if I got more I don’t think I would be able to find reasonable times to take it. My father became a C suite guy at a fairly large corp and by the end of his career had quite a lot of vacation days each year... but he could never find an opportunity to use half of it because he was accountable for far too much.
I don’t really know if I find anything disagreeable in it tbh. Vacation can be nice but it’s necessity is a function of your baseline work life balance... and work life balance tends to be harder the worse your job is. An interesting paradox in that the people who probably need it most are the least entitled to it per societal norms.
If your premise were true, you'd expect countries offering more vacation time to have higher productivity per hour worked. (I.e. more efficiency, even if less total production.) Instead, the U.S. has among the highest levels of productivity per hour worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP).... Americans are much more productive, even on a per-hour basis, than people in advanced democracies that have more vacation time.
So it seems to me that there are a lot of confounding factors here. Do we actually know what causes GDP/hour to go up and down? It doesn't seem directly related to vacation time.
It seems to me more like the Wikipedia article you linked to is saying "countries that give a lot of vacation to all citizens can still have a high GDP per hour worked" and we don't understand what other confounding factors can contribute to GDP/hour
Yeah, as another data point, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong are way below the US on the GDP-per-work-hour metric. Yet if you've ever been exposed to office life in any of them, you'd know that their work/life balance is far more tilted toward work than the US. You'll also notice that they have less per-hour GDP than countries with more statutorily mandated paid leave. I don't think we can really glean anything from this chart as to the effects that vacation time has on productivity.
American professionals (say, in California) have several times less free time and earn several times more money than Western Europeans (say, Germans). Different cultures value different things.
Job burnout? Try LIFE burnout. The job I've managed to compartmentalize and keep at bay, but life is burning me out and I'm not out of my thirties yet. Things are getting faster and more expensive just to live.
I find that If my work isn’t meaningful, it can really drain the life out of me (even more than truly demanding jobs).
I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting your eyes/brain.
There is a movement[0][1] towards shorter workweeks which I’m really interested in and, shameless plug[2], I run a site on this topic as well. There is real movement right now towards a 4 day work week in Western society especially in the UK.
I think there are some fundamental things that have changed that are much different than 40-50 years ago:
1. Work was much more compartmentalized 30 years ago. People may have worked long hours, but for the most part, when they were "done" for the day, they were done (obviously there were exceptions, like people on call). Now, though, there is always email and texts and Slack, so it's more difficult to fully decompress from work.
2. The nature of big business has drastically changed. First, many more people are in service jobs, and I'd argue that actually building something concrete has a higher immediate payoff for most folks. Also, as jobs have gotten more efficient and segmented, most people are more removed from decision making and a tangible feeling of how their effort goes into producing a valuable product.
3. The increasing inequality in America means there is more fear of falling behind, and jobs themselves are more tenuous, so there is more stress to work harder lest you fall out of a middle/upper-middle class.
40-50 years ago if there was an emergency my boss had to pick up a nice, chunky landline phone and call me, and _hope_ that I was home. Now they can just summon me on a whim. Of course, my boss might not even know a thing was broken, because he was at home and not at work too! (Unless he worked for a factory on shifts, power plant, restaurant, etc, - other non 9-5 business)
There's a reason all my vacations are mysteriously vague camping trips to places with terrible reception.
I don't even think a 20% cut in pay is fair. Is our productivity, at least in brain-driven jobs, equally distributed across all our working hours? In other words, if we work 20% fewer hours during the week, will we do 20% less work? Or is it more like 10%?
4 would be great progress, but I see 3 days as the point where we've really won—when "your job" is no longer the dominant force in your life. When an ordinary working person can answer with something other than what they do for a salary when asked "what do you do?" without being deliberately obtuse or "cute". When society and the economy are structured so a working person can actually put their family first, in terms of use of time in a week.
I'm a pro-family, pro-entrepreneur (UBI! Healthcare for all!) dirty socialist, I guess :-)
A couple generations ago people didn't have the luxury of feeling burnt out. They just had to get to work if they wanted to eat; asking about burn out wasn't even a relevant question. That situation still obtains for most people in poor countries today.
In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US.
I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly have no reason to exist outside of creating a job for the bureaucrats.
I have an OK job overall, but there's just a metric ton of approvals and paperwork that I end up having to do to actually write code, and as a result I get burnt out fairly often.
I feel burnt out regularly. Earlier in my career I loved reading about software development, both research and practice. But my job isn't particularly stressful. At some points, I feel stress at work, often due to a lack of control over the work environment and vision of the leadership. But they don't push me to work a lot of hours. We're encouraged to use our PTO.
I think the issue, in American culture, is bigger than just employers and career choices. My wife and I discuss this subject often. The problem is that we are a two career couple who are raising a child in a culture that hasn't, and may never, adapt to not having one parent at home. Our society isn't setup for it. Vital services, like healthcare or simply furnace maintenance before Winter, require a person home from 9am-5pm. Doing so requires either working remotely or a promise to make up the time when you get back to the office.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe working remotely will help. Maybe we need to postpone careers until kids are raised like my parents' generation did. (My wife is far better suited to a career. I would gladly volunteer to be at home if we didn't need both pays.)
I work six days a week. I leave my house at 7am return home around 7pm, pretty much have time to make dinner and chill for an hour so then go to bed and do it again. I haven't really been out and done anything for a few years now. My body is in pain constantly, I'm always exhausted but my sleep is always poor. I don't remember what it's like to not feel burnt out. It's been like this pretty much since I was in my early twenties and I'm in my thirties now and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of this stopping any time soon.
That's not healthy. Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week.
There's a good reason why people fought for a 40 hour work week. Life is not just about work; you need to relax too.
I refuse to work more than 32 hours a week, and that's working out very well for me. I have time for my hobbies, my kids, my friends and family, and I have time to just do nothing at all on occasion. And the hours I do work are very productive as a result. Admittedly my current project is so interesting that I often work a bit more than 32 hours, but it's because I want to, not because I have to.
I have a decent job, but I have student loans, I live in an expensive city and don't really have the ability to move elsewhere, at least half my cheque goes to rent each month, much of the rest goes towards bills and essentials. The overtime I work is the thing that lets me save money at all, otherwise I'd be living cheque to cheque.
So what's your plan? If you're looking for ideas to save more, I only have one, which is to live with another person (or add more if you already do so) to further cut rent and other bills.
I'm self-employed and work as freelancer. We negotiate my hourly rate, not how many hours I will work. I've never sacrificed any income to do this, because I've been doing this since long before I became a freelancer, and I make way more now than I did then. I have once refused an otherwise very interesting job because they refused to accept a 4-day work week. Their loss.
> Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week.
You might as well say "Please win the lottery".
Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.
People should and people have. A century ago, unions declared massive strikes for these and other issues.
A normal, sane job is not as rare as winning the lottery. Entire countries have people working very normal, sane hours. Americans need to stop tolerating these ridiculously long hours. Do 8 hours of good work for 5 days a week, then relax, sleep well, so you start your next day well-rested and ready to deliver another 8 hours of good work. This is a sane balance. Working more than you rest is not. Sacrificing your health and your life for your employer is idiocy.
For technically inclined people in the United States, it can be. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maximize your income or maximize your quality of life. It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously.
If you're a developer, in the USA, and you don't work on your life's work...why? There are limitless companies where you can put your 40 in and not literally burn yourself out to death.
Can you let us know the actual medical term and how was this linked to stress?
there is a lot of research these days about autoimmune diseases and how they are triggered by stress, but retina blisters is something I never heard about before.
I'm not a dev, I'm closer to a BI Analyst if anything. What I do is the epitome of bullshit jobs. The company would be wildly profitable if I just stopped showing up. Yet my reviews and feedback are always glowing even if I do 1 'thing' a week, and yeah 6 months down the line some finding I put into motion results in some marginal change somewhere. It's hard to feel the motivation to do more when the output feels irrelevant.
I'd leave, but it'd be hard to match the benefits, salary, and work/life balance in my region. I know I need to change though because my skills are atrophying due to the ennui.
As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers.
You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't.
15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life.
I don't get it at all. It might make sense if you're a founder or whatever and you love your job. Most people are working to live, but there is no "live", because there's no time that isn't work.
I'd rather be homeless. Can I choose to be homeless in Europe instead tho? ;)
The legal minimum in NL is (the equivalent of) four weeks per year (20 days on a 40 hours/week contract), so not that much more than US. Some fields (healthcare, construction, education) get more than that.
However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major life events, like funerals or child births are paid leave. And for most professions, there's no such things as unpaid overtime: you work more hours, you either get more pay or receive more vacation hours.
"Almost all workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday a year (known as statutory leave entitlement or annual leave)."
So 28 days.
Personally I've usually had about 25 days + bank holidays in contracts as standard (i.e. before negotiation), so 33 days in total.
The main distinction though is that because we don't have this 'health insurance tied to work' thing going on, it's at least theoretically possible for a median wage earner who hasn't loaded themselves up with debt to take a decent amount of time off by just leaving their job. Whether they actually do it doesn't matter - there's at least the mental release valve of knowing you can quit.
In the US it sounds like you could get away with that as a healthy 20 year old otherwise you'd be playing the lottery.
20 days minimum by law in Italy (plus sick leave when needed), in practice though it's more like 28 days for most jobs. Excluding weekends and national holidays of course.
Yeah. The notion of sprints doesn’t seem to be healthy at all. There’s always the next big thing on the horizon. No time to reflect on what you’re doing. Closely tracking velocity, knowing full well that it’s a futile exercise in controlling what’s happening.
>inb4 “you’re doing it wrong”
If so many people get it wrong, I see it a problem inherent to scrum, not its various implementations.
Not everyone is doing it wrong. My current sprint team is pretty laid back. I put my foot down against tracking velocity as a performance metric early on, though. But my argument against it was mostly that it was stupid and counterproductive.
This has nothing to do with scrum and agile. Or if it does, then they are part of the solution, because one of the rules is that you don't do overtime. If there's too much work to include all features before the deadline, you drop some of the features. Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developers, rather than on overly optimistic planning by managers. They empower the developer and give them the autonomy to do the job the way they see fit.
Well, I know what you’re trying to say, and technically, you’re correct - if any shred of the agile manifesto were observed, you would be actually correct, too - but “agile as practiced by everybody who practices it” is, for all intents and purposes, “agile and scrum” now, so we may as well stop pretending it’s in any way related to what it was supposed to be. Once the phrase “agile” got some mindshare, it was bastardized and twisted into the unholy abomination that we suffer today: that is, the exact same thing that came before it. If somebody were to come along and put together a perfect, workable, realistic, livable, maintainable, achievable software development methodology - say, the “pwrlma” method - it would be twisted back into what “agile and scrum” are today by the same people who can only reason by analogy. Software will always be managed as if it were a building construction effort and programmers will always be treated as slightly more educated bricklayers.
That is far too defeatist for my taste, and not my experience at all. The problem is that people subject themselves to bad managers and toxic corporate culture. Then Agile comes along and throws them a lifeline, and they let the bad managers take it, instead of taking it for themselves.
Real Agile is out there, and is being practices very effectively, but you've got to take it and apply it, and not let poor managers corrupt it. And there are many companies that do not have this toxic culture. Or start your own; software developers are in a better position to start their own business than most other professions.
My last job kept hiring more PMs and no techs. It was horrible. I kept having to tell the customers "Sorry we can't get the projects done, we have 5 project managers and only 2 techs."
I like some of the principles of agile but like the problem is the ceremonies chew up so much time. I have an none technical project manager who is absolutely in love with everything agile. I am in a project where basically 3 of us are going to do the work. I sit next to one of the people but we still have to have daily stand ups. I am one of those people who works in longish chunks, I can sit for two solid hours or more and not move if I am in the zone. But now because Agile says we need all these meetings and ceremonies I feel like half my week in is in the agile meetings or preparing for these meetings. Yes I have raised these issues but been overwritten by management. I am in Africa so I cannot just get another job.
In Scrum, and doubly so in Agile, meetings should not be taking up much time. Meetings are to make clear what needs to be done, because otherwise you end up wasting time on things that don't need to be done. Dailies should take a maximum of 15 minutes. Sprint review, retrospective and planning take more time, but that's only once per sprint, and they're still meant to be productive meetings. If the process isn't working for you, the retrospective is the time to bring that up, and together you can decide how to change your process so that it works better for you.
If your concerns are being overridden by management, your process is neither Agile nor Scrum.
Ceremonies are part a process to get shit done. Being agile doesn’t mean to follow a strict process but to create a process that suits all stakeholders and the dev team in particular.
I’m trying to say your team isn’t agile, it’s using a cookie cutter process template most likely. Print out the agile manifesto and tape it to the cofee machine.
That's all well and good if you don't work in a large organization. Taping anything to the coffee machine in my organization requires committee approval.
Not really. Developers are just held accountable or feel accountable for their own forced guesstymates. It was better when managers were guessing becouse they also have the means to change scope.
There's a very good reason why story points in scrum do not directly relate to time worked. You guess story points only in relation to each other. Over time, you can see how many story points you finish per sprint. By seeing how many story points are still on the backlog, you can estimate how long it will take. Add one or two sprints for unforeseen problems, and there's your estimate. Not based on anyone's guess, but on the time it takes to do actual work.
This, in short, is the core of value that Scrum adds to the ideas of Agile.
The only problem is that people insist on misunderstanding these simple ideas and try to do Scrum as wrong as possible. The problem isn't Scrum, the problem is people insisting on doing it wrong.
But not everybody is doing it wrong. Most companies I've worked for have invested in understanding Scrum, and have applied it very successfully.
The problem here is toxic corporate culture. Scrum and Agile are not magic spells that miraculously turn idiots into reasonable people. Sure, they could be used as levers to change that culture, but the culture absolutely needs to change, otherwise it's not going to work.
And that's something you can throw in their face: that they're not taking Scrum and Agile development seriously. If they say they want Scrum and Agile, then make sure you understand what they really mean, and hammer on it every time they trample on the autonomy of the developers. Every time they ask why things aren't done, tell them management is interfering with the process.
I'm not sure any system's going to do better. There aren't a ton of people who are good at applying (let alone thinking up) systems such that they work effectively and as intended. Too many will slice up and build atop a system then wonder why it's working so poorly, because they didn't understand the purpose of the parts they removed, or why the things they added will screw it up. "Well this is great, but we really need to..." NO. No you fucking don't. Unless you want to screw it up. But the people who get that, and who have the independence of action to prevent others from screwing up their processes, are uncommon. Even in management, which is exactly where that kind of thinking should be extremely valuable.
It’s a very naive thing to say. The problem is usually management misunderstanding what scrum is supposed to be. It’s a variant of ‘estimates become deadlines’.
Maybe. My guess is that Agile etc are suitible for some fields of programming and not others.
I'm just fed up with this Agilescrum thing. My present RnD workplace have been transitioning to it in the last years and it's really bad. The prior V-iteration process was good enough. We are mostly just making up estimates and report time accordingly to make the burndown chart look good.
No. Not in the minds of people who grok the point of scrum.
Just start pointing this out to people every time this comes up. It's not an exact time estimate, it's an abstract complexity estimate. Insist that the idiots get some actual training in Agile before they start corrupting it beyond recognition. If they want Agile, then they should invest in training people for it, and in spreading the culture that goes along with it. Because Agile is perhaps more about culture than about process.
Accurate software estimation is a technical skill that can be learned like any other. It's disappointing that so many developers don't take it seriously or make disciplined efforts to improve their skills.
I feel like this is misleading. There’s no magic bullet for software estimation. McConnell’s book talks about various techniques but the takeaway is that you know very little at the beginning of the project. There various techniques for estimation but you can never get away from the essential unknown unknowns.
Exactly. To make accurate estimates of how long it's going to take, you need to know how the team estimates the complexity of the work that still needs to be done, how they estimated the past, and how much they actually did in the past. In this particular team, with this way of working.
Only then do you have the information to make a halfway reliable estimate. Without that, it's just going to be guess work.
> "Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developer."
Sure, but the problem is that, aside from one job, I've never seen any organization that actually does that. Instead, agile/scrum is used as a micromanagement tool and developers get hammered if they don't close their Jira tickets in a timely fashion. It's an total perversion of what agile was intended to be.
I also find this to be the case. Developers have a minimum number of tickets / points we have to close every week. The number of points per ticket is decided by committee and in that committee there are developers of vastly different skills but all have the same minimum.
But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discovered by QA days / hours before release.
Although this could just be an issue with where I work as opposed to scrum / agile. :)
Yeah, this has nothing to do with scrum/agile. The number of points needs to be decided by the team of developers that's going to pick up those stories. There's to minimum number of tickets or points, you pick up what you can, and the number of points you average over a couple of sprints, helps to estimate how much time future work will take.
It seems a lot of companies are cargo-culting scrum.
Tell them to leave you alone. Have your PO keep the stakeholders at bay if they don't know how to behave. Take advice on scrum and agile only from people who actually know what they're talking about. Everybody else is just amateurs.
Beyond a certain point, if your backlog is continuously growing then your product owners simply aren't doing their job. The backlog should only contain thinks that can realistically be implemented within the next year or so (maybe two). Keeping anything in the backlog beyond that is pointless because by the time you get to it the customer requirements will have changed. So competent product owners need to actively purge backlog user stories which are no longer needed, and act as gatekeepers to limit what gets into the backlog in the first place.
I work in BI building data marts and reports. First we used to have what I would term technical user stories. Build this report, change that cube, build that mart... Then we added analysis stories and off late we now have design user stories. Our sprints are two weeks. One sprint ended up being the developer checking a tick box. But it took a whole month to complete because we had a two week analysis sprint and another two week "implementation" sprint. But guess what we successfully completed all our user stores.
I always thought it was very strange to call them "sprints" since in my experience you start one immediately after finishing another. In real life following sprinting with more sprinting would be a good way to make yourself pass out (or worse) before too long
But what about the relief of getting a release out to production? Immediately followed by the crushing stress of getting started on the next impossible sprint.
My personal experience has been the opposite, actually. Early on, I realized that I was constantly being asked by coworkers to “look at this, look at that”, none of which were related to the work that my actual manager had assigned me. So I said no: I focused on what my manager was telling me to do. That seemed to be the “right thing” to do. Everybody hated me because I wouldn’t help them. They showed up in meetings and said they couldn’t meet their commitments because commandlinefan “wasn’t available to help me get CVS set up on my computer”. Management churn being what it was, I never had the same manager for more than six months anyway, so by the time performance reviews came around, whoever my manager-du-jour happened to be based my performance review on the consistently negative things he was hearing from my coworkers. I couldn’t even defend myself by pointing to having accomplished what the previous manager told me to focus on, either: priority churn being what it was, most of it ended up being scrapped before it was used. I finally saw the writing on the wall and did a complete 180. I became the most helpful guy in the world. If anybody, ever, for any reason, asked for my help, I dropped whatever I was doing and focused on helping them until their problem was fixed. Performance reviews went from “needs serious improvement” to “exceeds expectations”. I rarely, if ever, finish anything that I’m actually supposed to be working on, and nobody cares. It’s all reputation, and mine is stellar. I haven’t said no in 20 years and I’ve never been more loved by corporate.
I was let go from my first dev job (fresh out of college no less) and the couple of months following were actually some of the happiest days of my life. Despite being unemployed, I got my mojo back, taught myself a bunch of new shit unrelated to programming, and tried a lot of new things I wouldn't otherwise have tried. Oftentimes I wonder how I could have been so happy given the circumstances, but it finally dawned on me: getting let go obliterated any conscious or subconscious burnout I had been suffering. I felt like a person again.
Just a couple days ago there was a big discussion about an article that said that early retirement will lead to cognitive decline. Work and burn out or retire and vegetate? Surely there are some better alternatives?
Retirement for me would mean working on what I love and only that. Presuming that my creativity and contribution are dependent on having an employer is shortsighted.
one difference between old classic slavery and modern employment slavery is that the slave-employees are not bound to a single master. They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether. Only people who own enough assets are free.
And surely it could be argue that I exaggerate, that people are indeed free to enterprise and try to make it on their own, as business owners (only really possible if you have enough assets to begin with). But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees.
If the only way to be "free" is through the enslavement of others, is that true liberty?
> They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether.
Oh yes they are free to quit working altogether. One can choose to become homeless. The more fortunate ones wouldn't even become homeless and would just have to reduce their consumption. But we love consuming a whole lot.
> Only people who own enough assets are free.
In some way they're slaves to their assets. Karl Marx wrote about this in Kapital.
> But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees.
They could easily forgo that. Few will though. Reminds me of the "the fisherman and the businessman" story.
an odd source, but OK.
I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty anymore but my daughter still sings Frere Jacque as "Something's broken Something's broken It's your fault!, It's your fault!" I spent half my life on pagerduty (so over half my life - waking and asleep, working in some sort of fashion).
It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment (and sleeping, if you count on-call).
Combine this with the nagging suspicion that none of this actually matters (See "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber) and burnout, detachment, etc. shouldn't be a surprise.