This just in: Working 50 hours a week sucks and trying to do it in fewer days, doubly so.
Someone (possibly Carlin) once complained that it's too bad stupidity doesn't hurt. I must be looking in different places than whoever it was has been looking.
I'm all for cutting down total hours, but personally 4x10 hour days still sound much better than 5x8. There is a lot of time and effort - both physically and mentally - that goes into the transition to and from work that I'd love to avoid. A few more hours a day meanwhile wouldn't bother me much at all.
I just literally couldn’t do it. My brain is completely checked out with 2 hours to go on an 8 hour day. I have to try with all the willpower I have if I want to get any work done in the last 2 hours.
It's strange. I hear a lot of talk about 4 day work week but not if they mean the same amount of work in four days or four days with the less total hours.
It's a bit frustrating because I don't like the 4 day 40 hour work week. In the winter in many areas it would be absolutely soul crushing. But the 4 day 8 hour per day work week I think should absolutely be implemented into almost every job immediately.
I see this as the answer for a lot of folks. But having run an office and half a company in the past... I've found that the benefits of a reduced hour work week are offset by the pressures/stresses of owning a business.
The only real saving grace of a 9-5 is that after 5, except on rare circumstances, my time is my time. I'm able to relatively stress free. If I'm running the show there is almost always something else that can be done. So picking reading by a river with some tea will almost always take a backseat to responding to whatever customer email that just came in.
I really don't understand the obsession with 40 hours. It's totally arbitrary, especially for knowledge workers.
On my contracts I've been taking lately I work 32 hours. It has done absolute wonders for my health. And I have no real proof, but I feel like I get just as much done. In some ways I may even get more done because having 3 days off every week makes me a lot fresher overall.
I've been doing 4×8 for years now. My wife works the same days, son goes to kindergarten¹. That leaves Friday through Sunday for household chores and relaxation. I wouldn't want to work more hours or days even if paid double.
1: Kindergarten is a huge benefit to his development, and he loves it. More and more countries are making kindergarten available to not just working parents but all (the Netherlands is going in that direction too). It's hard to overstate how beneficial that is for both (working) parents and child alike.
I've read about this a while back, sorry I only have a Dutch source[0]. Overall preschool daycare (even just a nanny) does have a positive effect on cognitive and social development, though preschool education does not add much benefit on top of that.
From personal experience, my kids also love to go there, as they do all kinds of fun activities and can play with their friends more freely outside of the school context (even though it's in the same building). And I think it's important for them to socialise with other kids as that is harder to create those situations naturally when you live a little remote as we do.
Also, ask any primary school teacher about the difference between children who went to kindergarten and those who didn't. It's not about education, but about socialization and emotional skills, as well as basic stuff like continence (toddlers tend to follow the examples set by older children in the kindergarten).
In the Netherlands it is available to all but only (heavily) subsidized for parents who work (both, unless you are in a one-parent household), are in education or vocational training, or are following an integration course for immigrants. If you are (long term) jobless you generally can't afford it, but that is changing, and the subsidy will probably apply to all parents in the future.
More study is needed here. Burn out is real, and being able to recover is very valuable. I also have no idea who you are, for all we know I work circles around you or vice versa.
But even if what you say is true, so? Why are we so obsessed with work? There's a lot more to life.
You're pulling that out of thin air. You have no idea if that is true. Your logic also says a seven day work week is ideal. But obviously we need to rest. Does 2 or 3 days of rest make us more productive? I honestly don't know. And neither do you.
Why wouldn't I know that? You don't know how to measure your own productivity? I don't work weekends because I'm not allowed to. If my company allows me to work 5 days and yours allows you to work 4, I will outproduce you. It's pretty simple.
This magical optimal rest-to-productivity gradient is dumb. That's why no sane college student is studying 4 days a week. In sheer production I will demolish you while you wishfully think your Friday of grazing about will magically make you 20% more productive than me the other 4 days.
What an odd way to look at it. The other way to look at it is the company hiring me will win while the company hiring you will go bankrupt, therefore losing your job and sulking back to 5-day land.
At least from a US perspective, a long history of labor organizing, labor laws, and more organizing, more labor laws that got us to 40 hours.
I think it’s less an “obsession” and is probably more realistically a fossilized anachronism of all the labor struggles and debates that came before the ones we have now.
I wonder if this won't become the norm. Our world may be on a shift toward maximum efficiency. No more work more to produce more, or try to do few to extract more money and overspend. Real efficiency.
Even though the number 40 is arbitrary, jumping down to the arbitrary number of 32 will shave off 20% of time available for productive work. This will be noticeable, especially if your competition sticks to 40.
For software development, though, this may have less consequence. A developer has to think for long swathes if time, and it's hard to stop right after 4:59pm. Equally, the intensity of the thought process is hard to assess, so a lot of slacking creeps in — partly because there's not enough time outside work hours to grapple with the life. Squeezing this slack into an explicit extra day off may be efficient.
Yes, for software I do about 20 hours of real productive work a week. Whether that's 3 days, 4 days, or 5 is sort of irrelevant. I'm paid to get a job done, not be in a chair for a number of hours.
So 36 hours a week are better like having Friday off every second week. But making 40 hours in 4 days - nope that is not a good idea.
I did experiment last year when I was doing 32 hours a week so I was taking vacation days every Friday for a month. I felt a lot better, salary hit was not that bad.
I have a small loan to pay back, when I am done with it I am going for 36 hours - well it will be one week 40 and other 32. I expect it still will be huge improvement for my well being.
3x8 is when most of life stops revolving very heavily around selling your time to do what other people who have money tell you to, and anything else whatsoever has a chance to become the main thing a normal person dedicates their life/time to in their prime years. That's the point at which we've really made it as a culture, IMO, and that's why even 4x8 is flawed (but a huge step in the right direction!)
4x10, as in TFA, isn't progress but just shifting things around. It's not a revolution, it's not new, and it doesn't change things in any interesting ways, IMO. Maybe it's a baby-step to 4x8? I dunno.
However, rather than messing with any of this (right now) I'd prefer that we drastically cut back who counts as "exempt" for the purposes of overtime, and fake "contractors" (actually full time workers) that are widespread all over the economy, et c. That seems like a solid step 1. Whole sections of the economy aren't even doing what's nominally "full time" now, but more. More hours should be on the table, but only at a significant premium so companies aren't free to just demand it for nothing, and workers should be free to refuse it (so that they have to offer enough that the "yes" is an actual "yes"). That way they only use it when they need it—you know, leverage market forces to do something good.
Also, I'd call out fixing healthcare and broadening coverage of anti-noncompete and pro-moonlighting laws to the entire country as vital if we want these changes to reduced-full-time-work to be an economic benefit, not hindrance. That'll make entrepreneurship or side-hustles far more accessible to people who want something resembling a normal life (having a family, for instance) and also aren't trust-fund kids or otherwise damn lucky, but who want to sell something they are fully responsible for and are choosing to do.
Something would also need to be done about current part-time workers, who suffer from a different "working too many hours" problem than white-collar folks (i.e. multiple jobs out of necessity). Much higher minimum wages (or, if we want to go farther, UBI) might be on the table. In general I think enhancing the market signaling power of the large bulk of the populace that's not doing so great now, could only help make our economy healthier and more robust—much of the point of having a market economy is to efficiently provide things people want, right? That would also go hand-in-hand with opening up time & opportunity for entrepreneurship. There'd be some challenges involved (the effect on real estate prices is absolutely the #1 concern, but, like... that's already going poorly, so we already need to find a way to stop that) but I don't think they're insurmountable.
The article is likely a plant by the establishment (Conde Nast here) who want to maintain a servant class, so they're grasping for any straw men they can find. As union talk spreads among tech workers, expect an article in Wired something like, "Could unions be bad?"
I'd like to see tech companies have the office occupied 6 (7?) days a week, 12 hours a day M-F, with a revolving door of people coming and going.
We are trying to run 24/7 operations and expect everyone to be in the office during the same 'core business hours' which means that wage theft is just one human error away from being a reality.
If I have to be there for anyone to make meaningful progress on deciphering an issue in my code, then we're writing the wrong code.
I used to have this opinion 5 years ago, when my job was some monotonous busy work (using my brain, but no code, engineering, or leadership). But, in my current role (product leadership), I'd far prefer 4 day workweeks for me and my team.
There is something truly wonderful about waking up and knowing that this entire day will not involve some set of responsibilities.
For about a year I did 20h weeks (independent contractor) as 4hour days.
Compared to 40h+ weeks, it was awesome obviously.
But there is overhead to getting ready for it, expending certain kind of energy, more likely to close laptop on something incomplete.. I thought I would save the afternoons for personal projects but I rarely felt like it.
The "n-hour workweek" is arbitrary. We work as much as we do because that's what the lending institutions need us to do so they can justify and manage the global trade and manufacture of calories, textiles, fuel, shelter, and implements.
We don't work 50-60 hour weeks at software companies because we'll die of starvation or exposure otherwise, we work that much because the finance trade our work supports allows us to live in a 2-story houses in the first world without knowing anything about construction, defense, farming, etc. The real work [1] gets handled by other people who make less money than us. But we still have to work so the lending institutions can make the debt contracts balance correctly.
[1] Yes, some of us do actually work on real projects, with real consequences to downtime, I understand. But how many brilliant engineers work for F+N or Spotify or whatever that could work on domestic engineering projects instead? Would they still have to work 60 hour weeks? Is such a project even possible without involving lending institutions, and the second those institutions are involved, doesn't that put us right back at the "justify the global finance infrastructure"?
You are speaking as if moving money around is some useless non-work. But it's the mechanism that makes the economy tick at scale, this is why you can easily buy potatoes grown in Idaho and order electronics assembled in China, while also buying a car without paying the cost upfront.
Let's declare, say, trucking as non-real work. Trucks produce nothing but pollution; why do truckers work the long hours they work, and command the high salaries they get? All the while the "real work" is done by other people?
(Disclaimer: I never worked for financial, trading, or trucking industries; my grandfather was a truck driver.)
Ultimately we all need food, shelter, clothing, and other things of decreasing necessity. The way we get those things is to trade something of value; few of us are capable of producing everything we need by ourselves. We all have different talents and abilities, but most of us find something to do that produces value for someone else. So that we don't have to directly trade e.g. eggs for a plumbing repair, we invented money so that the value we each produce could be abstracted into something that is acceptable in trade for anything else we need.
Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.
>Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.
But we're literally handing money to people in exchange for nothing right now (ie. welfare), yet US dollars are worth something.
One way to interpret welfare is the government paying off people who have no capacity to be productive from interfering with people who are productive. If the needy did not get “free money” they would have to resort to crime, which negatively affects others.
Rather the environment they live in has no investment or opportunity and the people living their, being poor and dealing with the hand that local investment in education has dealt them have difficult times getting out, let alone just surviving
We work hard because we make stuff people want. We can make more, better stuff by working hard. I do think 50-60 hour weeks are often counterproductive, but the money we make ultimately comes from providing value to someone. It isn't turtles all the way down.
If your business is operating mainly on loans instead of revenue, it's because the lenders believe that you will provide value to someone in the future, and that you'll be able to capture some of that value and give it to the lenders. The lenders can be wrong, but it's still about giving people things they want.
There are some bad businesses, for sure, which are about tricking people into giving you money without giving them something in return. And a lot of business activity is about jostling for a good negotiation position (e.g. consolidation), so that you can capture more of the value you provide. But because people control their spending, you ultimately have to make something people want (or make them want what you have) if you want to make money.
Overall, you almost make it sound like the global trade of calories/textiles/etc is a bad thing, but it is an extremely good thing! It is one of the best things!!!
Engineering firms have commonly done 4x 9 hour days with the remainder (to hit 40) either half day Friday or alternating Friday's off.
I've always enjoyed it.
Plus it makes adjustments easier and feel less burdensome - where if you need to take a few hours off during the week, it's easy to stay a bit later on Friday's without working past normal business hours.
And you don't feel overworked by Thursday night, as the guy interviewed said after doing 4x 10s.
I know I could do the same amount of work in less time, which is where the 4 day work week comes in. It's not about the same amount of hours in a week...
> When work is squeezed into four days, the human interactions that fill the interstitial time can suffer. “There wasn’t time for banter,” said one employee whose startup made the switch. Another said that he no longer had “time to daydream at work.”
So?
I for one am fine with this, thank you. If I want to socialise, I can have plenty with actual friends and family.
In my junior days I learned a lot, both technical and socially, from that "culture BS" from the office.
I don't like being just a random avatar in a chat app that takes Jira tickets on input and pushes git commits as an output. The new hires that joined in the post Covid WFH days have it really rough in our org. They just fade into the background of anonymity.
I guess it's fine if you already got a huge and reliable network of friends and contacts in the industry and your only goal is cashing bigger checks to retire early, which is also fine, everyone has different ages, lifestyles, goals in life and expectations from their workplace.
Yeah, but refining tickets, programming and getting good code review feedback from a competent and professional senior engineer are what you need to acquire experience and competence.
Over time this means a better salary, a faster career, and more significant lifetime achievements.
Water-cooler BS, pandering to the local hierarchy is just investing in your regrets-folder.
Sociality and networking are more effectively cultivated and owned long-term on neutral-ground: user-groups, gym, local-whatever-chapter, Meetup.
>Water-cooler BS, pandering to the local hierarchy is just investing in your regrets.
That is not what I had in mind as a positive experience. Working is such an environment is bad, in office or not, but in many countries this is the norm unfortunately (traditional big auto, Germany)
>Sociality and networking are more effectively cultivated and owned long-term on neutral-ground: user-groups, gym, local-whatever-chapter, Meetup.
Those groups of randos you meet a couple of times a month may be fun to hang out with for bouldering and a beer, but those relationships stay pretty superficial and may not be as reliable and ready to vouch for you as a colleague who you meet 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and knows you very well, and when he jumps ship can vouch for you if you wish to join him, instead of going through the interview grinder.
This is of course no rule and such experiences are of course anecdotal and can vary wildly depending on your luck or chance.
Does anyone really make friendships there that expand beyond that environment? I go to the gym, I know people there by name, make friendly chit-chat, I know what they do and big events in their lives, but that has never expanded beyond the time that we are there. I have never been asked to meet up somewhere else, grab dinner, come over and watch a game, etc. nor I have I asked that of anyone. It would seem like an imposition to me; people have their lives and just because you know someone in one context does not mean you are welcome or would be interested in the rest of it.
The only friends I have ever made are people I spend many hours of time with every day. Roommates, classmates, and in a few cases, colleagues at work. That long duration, close-proximity shared time seems to be an essential ingredient to forming friendships. I think that is also a reason that once people are out of school they find it much harder to develop new friendships -- life gets too compartmentalized and time-fractured.
Socializing with work colleagues is important too; it builds relationships. There's a certain 'awareness' about what is going on in an organization that you get from shooting the shit.
I like most of my colleagues but 90% of work produced chit chat is petty superficial, totally imaginary, if not utterly toxic. I wished and tried to have better convos but it's a race to the bottom. The only value of these meetings is to vent. Whoever doesn't work enough, is stupid, what your direct superior forced you to. I even tried to offer improvements, but it fell flat (no social status, no ears). Really a waste of existence, I'd rather talk to a betta fish.
I would love a 4d/10hr workweek. This schedule aligns much better with how I work. Starting work on any effort requires an initial investment of time to get spooled, and then anything after that is productive. This makes me prefer large chunks of working time, rather than smaller ones. Additionally, once I've started on something I feel a strong impulse to finish it in one sitting, and a 10 hour workday lets me do this without compromising my time off.
Why is this premise of this 40 hours compressed into 4 days? To me, reduced hours means making more of the time you actually spend working. 40-50 work weeks involve a lot of thumb twiddling and doing nothing in between the impactful stuff.
> I think we have to divide roles that requires deep work from roles that don't.
Very similar is the background mind vs not roles. Some people are great at completely separating their professional knowledge work time from the rest of their life. I am not. If a company pays for me to write software, they’re also getting my time in the bath tub thinking about software. This is different from when I was parking cars as a valet.
I would never, ever take a “reduced hours” software job for this reason. A job that had 25 hours on the books would occupy a similar amount of my headspace to a normal full time job but probably expect to pay less.
For how many employees seem to want it and what a deal it is under the right circumstances, I’m a little surprised more companies don’t offer reduced hours schedules for software. Maybe some adverse selection component.
I think this article fails to appreciate a few things that should change in a 4-day week:
- We (as individuals) should value our own time more than time working for a company.
- We continually, clinically, undervalue the role rest has in our ability to do better work. Sure, a four day week won't directly lead to more rest, but three days off would likely lead to people resting more.
- Many of us often spend a whole day or more of our weekends on personal things that pile up through the workweek (chores, paperwork, childcare/events), which is not restful.
- The company should not encourage work on the traditional 5th day.
Workers expect that incredible progress in automation (all the computers) would allow them to work less than before the automation has been made possible. And instead the Dutch will take the bridge apart to let Bezos’ mega yacht out into the sea. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like when people bash Amazon and the likes. It’s just a fact that the rich have become richer during the pandemic. People see it and they don’t like it.
Yes - this whole article and people who talk about lower productivity are missing the point.
Productivity per worker has been going up for decades. Real wages have been stagnant and we still work the same amount of hours even though we're a lot more productive now per hour worked than we used to be.
It's fine to lower productivity a bit in exchange for higher quality of life - it's been going up dramatically forever, but what's the point if we still all toil away just the same?
So, if Amazon employees work 4 days instead of 5 Bezos' yacht would be smaller and fit under that bridge? That seems a good solution that the Dutch did not take into account.
Oh. People are trying to fit 40 hours into 4 days, or trying to do 5 days worth of work in 4 days? I don't think anyone thought that would be good. 4 day workweek is committing to do 4/5ths less work so that people get less burned out. I don't think it would ever improve productivity (like in terms of "number of tedious todos done" or "number of meetings attended").
Optimizing for long-term mental health should probably be the only goal.
(For software engineers, I feel like most of the job is in-the-background thinking, so not having to wake up at a particular time 3 days a week instead of only 2 is definitely going to help that process. But I don't think it will ever scale to "call each customer and exchange pleasantries for 30 minutes a week". There is simply a hard time bound on how much work you can do in X hours with jobs like that, and doing less hours means doing less of those calls. No way around that.)
As a software engineer, no company I have worked for has ever enforced a 40-hour work week. Heck the magic "40" number isn't even written down anywhere. The expectation is simply that you work Monday-Friday and are available during your team's standard working hours (which differ wildly based on location, role and more). People put in anywhere from a couple hours to 12+ in a single day, and it varies based on the workload, time of year, project stage and more.
I've worked at a couple of companies now that introduce a "month off" day, which isn't tied to a particular holiday. At one place, they made it a "use it or lose it; your choice", so typically the last Friday of the month became an unofficial holiday. At my current place, it's preselected to be a day everyone takes off together.
When this was introduced at one company, they noticed that "sick days" actually dropped massively, to the point it really cost them nothing to introduce month off days.
Personally, it's amazing what that one day does for your mental health. You just pile on chores or take an extra day off, and boom - 4 day weekend which feels like a real vacation. And because everyone realistically is off together, you're not missing much.
I kind of see the 4 day week as an amplified version of the month off day, and would be curious to see if there's any comparison between the two ideas. And I'd be curious what the frequency of "sick days" taken are in a 4-day week company vs a 5-day company
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadSomeone (possibly Carlin) once complained that it's too bad stupidity doesn't hurt. I must be looking in different places than whoever it was has been looking.
The general argument for a 4-day work week is 4, 8 hour days, which is meaningfully different.
Some people round that 4 days down to 30 hours, which is 7.5 hours a day, with a slight chance of missing the worst of rush hour in one direction.
It's a bit frustrating because I don't like the 4 day 40 hour work week. In the winter in many areas it would be absolutely soul crushing. But the 4 day 8 hour per day work week I think should absolutely be implemented into almost every job immediately.
I'm writing this comment in the shore of a river nearby, making tea in a fire.
The only real saving grace of a 9-5 is that after 5, except on rare circumstances, my time is my time. I'm able to relatively stress free. If I'm running the show there is almost always something else that can be done. So picking reading by a river with some tea will almost always take a backseat to responding to whatever customer email that just came in.
On my contracts I've been taking lately I work 32 hours. It has done absolute wonders for my health. And I have no real proof, but I feel like I get just as much done. In some ways I may even get more done because having 3 days off every week makes me a lot fresher overall.
1: Kindergarten is a huge benefit to his development, and he loves it. More and more countries are making kindergarten available to not just working parents but all (the Netherlands is going in that direction too). It's hard to overstate how beneficial that is for both (working) parents and child alike.
From personal experience, my kids also love to go there, as they do all kinds of fun activities and can play with their friends more freely outside of the school context (even though it's in the same building). And I think it's important for them to socialise with other kids as that is harder to create those situations naturally when you live a little remote as we do.
[0] https://www.nro.nl/onderzoeksprojecten/effecten-van-voor-en-...
But even if what you say is true, so? Why are we so obsessed with work? There's a lot more to life.
This magical optimal rest-to-productivity gradient is dumb. That's why no sane college student is studying 4 days a week. In sheer production I will demolish you while you wishfully think your Friday of grazing about will magically make you 20% more productive than me the other 4 days.
I think it’s less an “obsession” and is probably more realistically a fossilized anachronism of all the labor struggles and debates that came before the ones we have now.
For software development, though, this may have less consequence. A developer has to think for long swathes if time, and it's hard to stop right after 4:59pm. Equally, the intensity of the thought process is hard to assess, so a lot of slacking creeps in — partly because there's not enough time outside work hours to grapple with the life. Squeezing this slack into an explicit extra day off may be efficient.
I also find I tend to work 24/7 in some capacity. Jumping out of bed to email myself a solution to an issue I've been mulling over does happen.
I did experiment last year when I was doing 32 hours a week so I was taking vacation days every Friday for a month. I felt a lot better, salary hit was not that bad.
I have a small loan to pay back, when I am done with it I am going for 36 hours - well it will be one week 40 and other 32. I expect it still will be huge improvement for my well being.
4x10, as in TFA, isn't progress but just shifting things around. It's not a revolution, it's not new, and it doesn't change things in any interesting ways, IMO. Maybe it's a baby-step to 4x8? I dunno.
However, rather than messing with any of this (right now) I'd prefer that we drastically cut back who counts as "exempt" for the purposes of overtime, and fake "contractors" (actually full time workers) that are widespread all over the economy, et c. That seems like a solid step 1. Whole sections of the economy aren't even doing what's nominally "full time" now, but more. More hours should be on the table, but only at a significant premium so companies aren't free to just demand it for nothing, and workers should be free to refuse it (so that they have to offer enough that the "yes" is an actual "yes"). That way they only use it when they need it—you know, leverage market forces to do something good.
Also, I'd call out fixing healthcare and broadening coverage of anti-noncompete and pro-moonlighting laws to the entire country as vital if we want these changes to reduced-full-time-work to be an economic benefit, not hindrance. That'll make entrepreneurship or side-hustles far more accessible to people who want something resembling a normal life (having a family, for instance) and also aren't trust-fund kids or otherwise damn lucky, but who want to sell something they are fully responsible for and are choosing to do.
Something would also need to be done about current part-time workers, who suffer from a different "working too many hours" problem than white-collar folks (i.e. multiple jobs out of necessity). Much higher minimum wages (or, if we want to go farther, UBI) might be on the table. In general I think enhancing the market signaling power of the large bulk of the populace that's not doing so great now, could only help make our economy healthier and more robust—much of the point of having a market economy is to efficiently provide things people want, right? That would also go hand-in-hand with opening up time & opportunity for entrepreneurship. There'd be some challenges involved (the effect on real estate prices is absolutely the #1 concern, but, like... that's already going poorly, so we already need to find a way to stop that) but I don't think they're insurmountable.
I'd have usable time _every single night_. That sounds amazing.
We are trying to run 24/7 operations and expect everyone to be in the office during the same 'core business hours' which means that wage theft is just one human error away from being a reality.
If I have to be there for anyone to make meaningful progress on deciphering an issue in my code, then we're writing the wrong code.
For about a year I did 20h weeks (independent contractor) as 4hour days. Compared to 40h+ weeks, it was awesome obviously.
But there is overhead to getting ready for it, expending certain kind of energy, more likely to close laptop on something incomplete.. I thought I would save the afternoons for personal projects but I rarely felt like it.
We don't work 50-60 hour weeks at software companies because we'll die of starvation or exposure otherwise, we work that much because the finance trade our work supports allows us to live in a 2-story houses in the first world without knowing anything about construction, defense, farming, etc. The real work [1] gets handled by other people who make less money than us. But we still have to work so the lending institutions can make the debt contracts balance correctly.
[1] Yes, some of us do actually work on real projects, with real consequences to downtime, I understand. But how many brilliant engineers work for F+N or Spotify or whatever that could work on domestic engineering projects instead? Would they still have to work 60 hour weeks? Is such a project even possible without involving lending institutions, and the second those institutions are involved, doesn't that put us right back at the "justify the global finance infrastructure"?
Let's declare, say, trucking as non-real work. Trucks produce nothing but pollution; why do truckers work the long hours they work, and command the high salaries they get? All the while the "real work" is done by other people?
(Disclaimer: I never worked for financial, trading, or trucking industries; my grandfather was a truck driver.)
Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.
But we're literally handing money to people in exchange for nothing right now (ie. welfare), yet US dollars are worth something.
If your business is operating mainly on loans instead of revenue, it's because the lenders believe that you will provide value to someone in the future, and that you'll be able to capture some of that value and give it to the lenders. The lenders can be wrong, but it's still about giving people things they want.
There are some bad businesses, for sure, which are about tricking people into giving you money without giving them something in return. And a lot of business activity is about jostling for a good negotiation position (e.g. consolidation), so that you can capture more of the value you provide. But because people control their spending, you ultimately have to make something people want (or make them want what you have) if you want to make money.
Overall, you almost make it sound like the global trade of calories/textiles/etc is a bad thing, but it is an extremely good thing! It is one of the best things!!!
I've always enjoyed it.
Plus it makes adjustments easier and feel less burdensome - where if you need to take a few hours off during the week, it's easy to stay a bit later on Friday's without working past normal business hours.
And you don't feel overworked by Thursday night, as the guy interviewed said after doing 4x 10s.
So?
I for one am fine with this, thank you. If I want to socialise, I can have plenty with actual friends and family.
I don't like being just a random avatar in a chat app that takes Jira tickets on input and pushes git commits as an output. The new hires that joined in the post Covid WFH days have it really rough in our org. They just fade into the background of anonymity.
I guess it's fine if you already got a huge and reliable network of friends and contacts in the industry and your only goal is cashing bigger checks to retire early, which is also fine, everyone has different ages, lifestyles, goals in life and expectations from their workplace.
Over time this means a better salary, a faster career, and more significant lifetime achievements.
Water-cooler BS, pandering to the local hierarchy is just investing in your regrets-folder.
Sociality and networking are more effectively cultivated and owned long-term on neutral-ground: user-groups, gym, local-whatever-chapter, Meetup.
Hear me
That is not what I had in mind as a positive experience. Working is such an environment is bad, in office or not, but in many countries this is the norm unfortunately (traditional big auto, Germany)
>Sociality and networking are more effectively cultivated and owned long-term on neutral-ground: user-groups, gym, local-whatever-chapter, Meetup.
Those groups of randos you meet a couple of times a month may be fun to hang out with for bouldering and a beer, but those relationships stay pretty superficial and may not be as reliable and ready to vouch for you as a colleague who you meet 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and knows you very well, and when he jumps ship can vouch for you if you wish to join him, instead of going through the interview grinder.
This is of course no rule and such experiences are of course anecdotal and can vary wildly depending on your luck or chance.
Does anyone really make friendships there that expand beyond that environment? I go to the gym, I know people there by name, make friendly chit-chat, I know what they do and big events in their lives, but that has never expanded beyond the time that we are there. I have never been asked to meet up somewhere else, grab dinner, come over and watch a game, etc. nor I have I asked that of anyone. It would seem like an imposition to me; people have their lives and just because you know someone in one context does not mean you are welcome or would be interested in the rest of it.
The only friends I have ever made are people I spend many hours of time with every day. Roommates, classmates, and in a few cases, colleagues at work. That long duration, close-proximity shared time seems to be an essential ingredient to forming friendships. I think that is also a reason that once people are out of school they find it much harder to develop new friendships -- life gets too compartmentalized and time-fractured.
Anecdotal: I'm a contractor and I can't think of a lasting work-derived friendship that wasn't reinforced via these other networks.
Work is work, every time I leave I collect a couple more LinkedIn contacts but most remain figurines on a screen. Those few I bump into IRL develop.
Also I don't have any actual friends.
At times early in my career I took breaks away from programming.
The role wasn't as mentally engaging as programming and you could leave your brain at the door when you left each day.
It was amazing, I almost stayed there permanently, I wasn't enamored with the work but each week was true mental reset.
I think we have to divide roles that requires deep work from roles that don't.
Just like we have to separate butt in seat inbound sales roles from programming.
For programming type roles, 5x5or 4x8 would work better in my estimation depending on meeting workload.
Very similar is the background mind vs not roles. Some people are great at completely separating their professional knowledge work time from the rest of their life. I am not. If a company pays for me to write software, they’re also getting my time in the bath tub thinking about software. This is different from when I was parking cars as a valet.
I would never, ever take a “reduced hours” software job for this reason. A job that had 25 hours on the books would occupy a similar amount of my headspace to a normal full time job but probably expect to pay less.
For how many employees seem to want it and what a deal it is under the right circumstances, I’m a little surprised more companies don’t offer reduced hours schedules for software. Maybe some adverse selection component.
- We (as individuals) should value our own time more than time working for a company.
- We continually, clinically, undervalue the role rest has in our ability to do better work. Sure, a four day week won't directly lead to more rest, but three days off would likely lead to people resting more.
- Many of us often spend a whole day or more of our weekends on personal things that pile up through the workweek (chores, paperwork, childcare/events), which is not restful.
- The company should not encourage work on the traditional 5th day.
Productivity per worker has been going up for decades. Real wages have been stagnant and we still work the same amount of hours even though we're a lot more productive now per hour worked than we used to be.
It's fine to lower productivity a bit in exchange for higher quality of life - it's been going up dramatically forever, but what's the point if we still all toil away just the same?
Optimizing for long-term mental health should probably be the only goal.
(For software engineers, I feel like most of the job is in-the-background thinking, so not having to wake up at a particular time 3 days a week instead of only 2 is definitely going to help that process. But I don't think it will ever scale to "call each customer and exchange pleasantries for 30 minutes a week". There is simply a hard time bound on how much work you can do in X hours with jobs like that, and doing less hours means doing less of those calls. No way around that.)
When this was introduced at one company, they noticed that "sick days" actually dropped massively, to the point it really cost them nothing to introduce month off days.
Personally, it's amazing what that one day does for your mental health. You just pile on chores or take an extra day off, and boom - 4 day weekend which feels like a real vacation. And because everyone realistically is off together, you're not missing much.
I kind of see the 4 day week as an amplified version of the month off day, and would be curious to see if there's any comparison between the two ideas. And I'd be curious what the frequency of "sick days" taken are in a 4-day week company vs a 5-day company
> The company changed its schedule to four 10-hour days
Yeah, that's not the idea. They even acknowledge it, but still make it the center of the piece.
Sounds like any day of remote work to me.