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Ask HN: Is full-time employment pure status quo?

4 points by jdmoreira ↗ HN
The job market is mostly binary in the sense that people are either employed and work 40h/week or are unemployed and work 0h/week. I can't figure out an economic explanation for this. My intuition tells me that for the market to be optimal and more efficient it would also have to include the percentage of how much you work.

I also believe that it's easier to extract more value per hour from a programmer that works 20h/week than a programmer that works 40h/week, so why not adjust for that?

Am I missing something?

6 comments

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kevsim
I've worked part time as an engineering manager before. Anything from 80% down to 50% (after my kids were born, when trying to start a startup on the side, etc.). It's usually possible to scale your work to suit the percentage you want to work.

However, in all of the times I tried to do this part time work, I failed to strike the balance I wanted. The reason for this is that your colleagues aren't working the same schedule is you. They may not know your reduced schedule (even if it's in you calendar) or they may just not care. But it's very hard (at least for me, YMMV) to ignore phone calls, texts, slacks and emails when your teammates (or people who report to you) are asking for help with something.

So I think for this to work, it would need to be ingrained into the company culture.

goodcanadian
It is often possible to flexibly reduce your hours after you've worked at a place for some time, but it is much harder to start off that way from day one. The default assumption is that you will work 40+ hours per week. In short, I've wondered about this question myself. The best I've been able to come up with is cultural expectation.
ThrowawayR2
The economics of supporting an employee are optimal with them doing a full 40 hour workweek because of fixed costs. Their office space, desk, and equipment cost the same whether they are working 1 hour a week or 40 hours a week. Their medical insurance that covers them 24/7 and other benefits cost the same whether they are working 1 hour a week or 40 hours a week.

To reach the same optimal point for a half-time employee, their pay would have to be reduced by more than half to account for the fixed costs.

JoeAltmaier
Not making sense to me. Fixed costs are a small fraction of pay. Further, costs are not subtracted from pay, but added to pay to calculate total cost of employee?

In some imaginary scenario where you simply use twice the people and twice the fixed assets to perform the same tasks, then they'd be paid for half a job minus half the fixed costs I suppose. But not necessary to operate like that. Could share office space, share most fixed costs. Only medical remains.

And some jobs don't even require full-time for the company to thrive. Payroll has to be processed every two weeks only, and doesn't take 2 weeks to calculate. Are they not worth having then?

</pedant>

ThrowawayR2
> "Fixed costs are a small fraction of pay."

Across all employee types in the US, the estimate is that wages are ~70% of the costs and the the other ~30% are benefits and other fixed costs: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm. If that's small, I'd like to see your definition of large.

As another datapoint, though this site is likely a bit biased (they're selling consulting services), they provide an estimated breakdown for a $100k/year tech employee that comes to about 46% burden rate (i.e. for every dollar paid to the employee there's an extra 46 cents in cost): https://telegraphhillsoftware.com/hiring-technical-employees...

JoeAltmaier
Sure you 'fully load' costs on employees. But you have to have a building etc, no matter if its full. Not quite fair to divide 'cost of doing business' across employees, and mistakenly assume hiring another employee is going to change that.

And yes, 1/3 is a small fraction. A large fraction would be 2/3 etc. I think I said that right, its normal mathematical usage.

Anyway, its all talking thru our hats. In Russia for instance during the early Soviet years, they had no weekends. Only occasional holidays. So 40 hours is heaven compared to that.

Honestly, 'full-time' Americans at least, typically get 114 days off a year. Out of 365. Pretty soft life.