Um... I advocate for in-person work and working hard. I do not advocate for this. Elon has definitely made lives worse for Twitter employees, those that were laid off, fired, and retained.
Instead of jugdging for a silly pic, probably in extreme circumstances, why can't you think two things?
1. it is an exceptional situation.
2. you know if the person accepted?
3. probably the salary is high.
I myself have even worked 22 hours in a row or 16/12/10/11 in one week in a very extreme case. I do not blame anyone.
Labour is usually 8hrs/day 40hr/week. Bc we got used to. But when Korean and Chinese overtake us there will not be amount of whining that saves us from our lower productivity bc they have a harder mind.
With this I do not mean we should work super hard. What I mean is that if sometimes a situation requires extra work for some reason that we cannot even asses from a single pic, then people should be allowed to do it.
I know I will get a ton of negatives for this. That is not going to change my opinion. We learnt whining at our fullest as if that was going to fix something.
>Labour is usually 8hrs/day 40hr/week. Bc we got used to. But when Korean and Chinese overtake us there will not be amount of whining that saves us from our lower productivity bc they have a harder mind.
I'm with you here. A lot of Silicon Valley workers are used to 35 hour work weeks with extremely inflated salaries. They think just because they know how to write a for loop, they should be treated by kings and queens. And when Chinese and Korean companies outcompete them, they become racist or anti-Asian.
You know? Whether we like it or not, an asian is not usually looking at the watch to see when it is time to go.
Productivity-wise I think they make some mistakes we westernes do not make, like for example, in communication, because of many cultural things, they tend to not speak out. That is in our advantage to some extent.
On the other hand, they are not going to look at the clock and say "hey my contract is 40 hours I am gonna call the union!". Like it or not, this part is destroying us.
It is a matter of time. China is already overtaking US in some key areas technology-wise, like electric car (they own also 80% of lithium mines) and other stuff. So if you want to fool yourself...
My opinion is that we have been getting steadily worse in values from the fact that we became very comfortable. By this I mean also myself: my parents were better in attitude and my grandparents also.
That is how I see it. God forgive me for being politically incorrect and wanting to enslave humanity (probably I would be accused of things like this nowadays in Europe) or something for saying that, but productivity comes from labour.
We still have an advantage on some areas, such as communication and a big part of the education. But the level of improvement in Asia is really big already.
I do not talk from outside. I have been in Asia for 11 years living.
If we do not give a push to our mindsets, we will become irrelevant and that includes leaning on effort and self-reliance and self-improvement, which is what took us here. I see (Europe, dnt know US but from the media looks like kind of the same) a huge amount of rights and whining.
I know I will get more negatives for this. I just describe what I see :)
You are just repeating the same arguments that were repeated back then. It's like you are running circles around the discussion at hand. Asia will neither overtake the west in worker productivity nor revenue per worker anytime soon if at all. They need to lift way more people out of poverty before it will ever happen. At the moment they are running their economy on scale but as we are seeing now with their housing market, draconian covid lockdowns and governmental regulations, that they are running on fumes with the engine light on.
>On the other hand, they are not going to look at the clock and say "hey my contract is 40 hours I am gonna call the union!". Like it or not, this part is destroying us.
Did you come straight outta 1850?
This is not destroying is at all. We used to work this much in the US. We fought against this back when and gained labor rights and had growth and productivity since then along with quality of life.
When you bring a country up to a middle class life this happens. Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
> Did you come straight outta 1850?
> This is not destroying is at all
Your outcome comes from two things: from productivity vs payment. That is the same today and in 1850. No law is going to stop that.
So, if they are not there yet but they will be and they work more, you can see the outcome? We are quite better at communication IMHO in the westerner world in working environments. And still more productive. But the distance is narrowing.
In a scenario where they do not have all those laws and they still keep the "1850 mindset" they will eventually have better products at lower prices.
> Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
Data taken from? Of course this depends on the activity, but no matter what you do, there will still be first, secondary and tertiary sectors. Mostly tertiary for developed countries, but you still support from the others...
I am not proposing to work 80 hours per week, in fact. I am just giving you awareness of what is coming right now. As long as we have something else to offer it will be ok (I do not think we have much more to offer anymore, that can be sustained in the next 20-30 years unless we do a shift in mindset). The distance is narrowing a lot and that means that at some point... did you see how many strategic sectors around all Europe chinese bought? From harbours to business, etc.?
] More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.
] In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.
These are specifically speaking to software developers because those are the resources I know best.
Programmers aren't special - these factors are generally true for middle-class jobs and manufacturing jobs (as Ford's research showed in the 1920s.)
If you believe otherwise, where's your data?
BTW, going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism". Some of the ways that overtime can cause presenteeism are: working while tired due to lack of sleep, migraines from stress, feeling pressured to go to work while sick, lower general health and well-being from lack of exercise/fun, and paying bills and doing other personal tasks while at work.
A gross but meaningful estimate could be per-capita evolution (though there are other factors, such as not leading the economy which gives you advantage to catch up).
If the hole keeps narrowing... :)
> going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism"
I do not fundamentally disagree with this. I do know performance is not exclusively tied to the number of hours worked. And also burnout can do bad things to you. But if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way, probably the cost/benefit is not proportional to the extra hours but it will show a trend overall.
Again, lots of long hour jobs are not creative/thinking type of work, it's repetitive work. The thing about repetitive work is we either automated it or shipped it to low labor cost countries. As the cost of labor rises then we'll see more of those jobs get automated.
Simply put as more work becomes thinking/creative long hours are going to harm productivity.
Are you familiar with any of the research on the topic?
Past about 40 hours / week, across a wide range of jobs, it's more cost effective to hire new employees than to take the marginal reduction in performance.
> per-capita evolution
Like the early days of the Soviet Union, when the country went from being one of the most backward countries of Europe to having space travel? Is that your metric?
Regardless, you haven't presented data, only conjectured that such data exists.
> if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way
Your "if" carries a lot of weight.
You need to show that such a country exists. Present data please.
Here's are more examples of how 80 hours/week is not realistic for an entire country's workforce.
] The estimates above on the output-hours relationship suggest that, for most [observed British munitions workers during WWI], weekly output rises with weekly hours of work although, after a point, the increase in output declines as more hours are worked. This point where the marginal product starts to decline varies with the workers and with the work done. For hours of 48 or less, weekly output tends to be proportional to weekly hours worked and the decline in the marginal product of hours occurs after 48 weekly hours.
See the Marginal Product of Hours in Table 5? After about 48 hours, it's better for the company to hire someone else. After about 65 hours per week, the marginal value is negative. See also Table 4 "Implied Output-Hours Relations Corresponding to Two Fitted Spline Functions".
] Shepard and Clifton (2000) established that manufacturing productivity does not necessarily improve when hours are lengthened. Their empirical study of aggregate panel data for 18 manufacturing industries within the US economy suggests that the use of overtime hours actually lowers average productivity, measured as output per worker hour, for almost all of the industries in the sample, even when the data are controlled or corrected. More precisely, a 10-per cent increase in overtime resulted, on average, in a 2.4-per cent decrease in productivity measured by hourly output.
] Indeed, it appears that in many, if not most, industries in the United States, shorter hours are actually associated with higher rates of output per hour (Holman et al., 2008, see Figure 1). ...
] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).
What are you talking about? Americans are proud of being overworked. They complain-brag about working 50hs and not seeing their kids. They use it both as “look at me I’m NEEDED at work for 800hs a day” and as an excuse to not do healthier things.
I'm not sure about China, but South Korea fertility rate is .8. Planning to work harder than a people group currently going extinct sounds like suicide to me.
Life just isn't work, but work is one part of life. Work maximalists seem to forget this.
Well, this is part of my point. Life is not only work, but if you have leading products/economies you stay in a better position. If a whole block overtakes the other as we are legislating better and better conditions to non-end without paying attention to other factors, the fate is clear.
Why level down?
Thinking that working less than 40hs = being royal is that terrible work culture Americans have to make themselves feel better about not being effective and efficient. Some think that being in an office longer equals putting out more product when in reality they are just farting around the office wasting time and keeping everyone else hostage of their poor time management. If I get my project done in 30hs and want to go home, am I royal? Just work harder, smarter, not longer.
Who cares?
The whole ponzi-scheme is coming down in the next 5 years anyway.
Climate refugee waves, climate wars, working for worthless money to rent property the old generations pension funds hold hostage to keep the facade up for another year.
Why should anyone pour the limited good years they have into this, to appease a lifestyle reality that will be out of stock no matter what?
Why try to be part of the kings court and in favor, when they open a head bowling alley on the place de concorde?
I really do not get the appeal of this self-hypnotizing mindset. Do you think one can will reality into a different shape, by the powers of believe alone?
China is coming undone as we write.
Go home, schedule a meetup with your parents, family, friend, anyone.
> Labour is usually 8hrs/day 40hr/week. Bc we got used to.
Because working more overtime lowers average productivity. That's a reason why Ford switched to a 40-hour week even though he wasn't legally required to do so.
And its likely is a factor for why "South Korea has the fastest shortening working time in the OECD" and "[in China] work hours have reportedly been falling for about three decades due to rising productivity, better labor laws, and the spread of the two-day weekend." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time
> I myself have even worked 22 hours in a row
Sure. But don't mix short exceptions like this with derision about 40hr/weeks and "when Korean and Chinese overtake us", because those are two entirely different topics.
> Sure. But don't mix short exceptions like this with derision about 40hr/weeks and "when Korean and Chinese overtake us", because those are two entirely different topics.
No, I do not try to mix it. Just the news looked like a bit out of context to me.
I do not know what they found when they started to inspect and how urgent it is to fix or whatever whatever they found, but I guess that Musk is not carrying with him a whip and making everyone sleep in-office systematically.
It could be perfectly a peak of work for some reason. but it looks like they try to mean something else.
They are in this situation because Elon Musk keeps haphazardly pulling the ground under them. There is no larger purpose other than an incompetent, vindictive billionaire trying to save money after buying something he didn't want. Like driving these people to the wall will do anything for Twitter. The people needed for running the platform were either fired or quit. They deployed Twitter Blue without a proper privacy review, potentially in violation of FTC's consent order, which can even land people in jail.
Let’s just be unnecessarily skeptical. Follow me on this line of thinking.
“Hmm Elon has a reputation for not liking hard workers (the comment in his book about him getting mad the spacex parking lot wasn’t sufficiently busy on a Saturday), he’s doing a massive layoff, he’s stated this random goal (finish this or get fired)…..hmmm….ok team let’s do this: photograph me sleeping and post it, and then if I don’t get fired for being perceived as working hard, I’ll make sure you’re protected too”.
There is zero chance you’d post a twitter photo of your boss in that setting without pre clearing their permission. Also, as a former investment banker, I’ve slept under my desk a few times and always kept a sleeping bag hidden away. If you’re actually working hard you know how you do this? You either close and lock your office door, or go out of your way to obscure what you’re doing….no one wants to know or see you’re sleeping at the office like an animal.
Of course that’s the most skeptical least trustful view. Still, let’s take a grain of salt. The amount of PR she’s generated from that picture is massive. Assume she gets fired now; due to preempting with the sleeping on the floor pic, it’d cause a massive backlash. So in a way she purchased insurance, if you want to be cynical, for herself in a very calculated way.
Finally these high school theater classes pay off. I don't even mean it in a negative way I bet you get a lot of crownie points on Musks chart for performative work I would abuse it too.
I applaud for people enjoying doing things, as long as you are happy, do it your way. Life is tradeoffs, we cannot have everything anyway. Doing what you love to do is a bless.
38 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] thread1. it is an exceptional situation. 2. you know if the person accepted? 3. probably the salary is high.
I myself have even worked 22 hours in a row or 16/12/10/11 in one week in a very extreme case. I do not blame anyone.
Labour is usually 8hrs/day 40hr/week. Bc we got used to. But when Korean and Chinese overtake us there will not be amount of whining that saves us from our lower productivity bc they have a harder mind.
With this I do not mean we should work super hard. What I mean is that if sometimes a situation requires extra work for some reason that we cannot even asses from a single pic, then people should be allowed to do it.
I know I will get a ton of negatives for this. That is not going to change my opinion. We learnt whining at our fullest as if that was going to fix something.
I'm with you here. A lot of Silicon Valley workers are used to 35 hour work weeks with extremely inflated salaries. They think just because they know how to write a for loop, they should be treated by kings and queens. And when Chinese and Korean companies outcompete them, they become racist or anti-Asian.
Productivity-wise I think they make some mistakes we westernes do not make, like for example, in communication, because of many cultural things, they tend to not speak out. That is in our advantage to some extent.
On the other hand, they are not going to look at the clock and say "hey my contract is 40 hours I am gonna call the union!". Like it or not, this part is destroying us.
It is a matter of time. China is already overtaking US in some key areas technology-wise, like electric car (they own also 80% of lithium mines) and other stuff. So if you want to fool yourself...
My opinion is that we have been getting steadily worse in values from the fact that we became very comfortable. By this I mean also myself: my parents were better in attitude and my grandparents also.
That is how I see it. God forgive me for being politically incorrect and wanting to enslave humanity (probably I would be accused of things like this nowadays in Europe) or something for saying that, but productivity comes from labour.
I do not talk from outside. I have been in Asia for 11 years living.
If we do not give a push to our mindsets, we will become irrelevant and that includes leaning on effort and self-reliance and self-improvement, which is what took us here. I see (Europe, dnt know US but from the media looks like kind of the same) a huge amount of rights and whining.
I know I will get more negatives for this. I just describe what I see :)
Did you come straight outta 1850?
This is not destroying is at all. We used to work this much in the US. We fought against this back when and gained labor rights and had growth and productivity since then along with quality of life.
When you bring a country up to a middle class life this happens. Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
Your outcome comes from two things: from productivity vs payment. That is the same today and in 1850. No law is going to stop that.
So, if they are not there yet but they will be and they work more, you can see the outcome? We are quite better at communication IMHO in the westerner world in working environments. And still more productive. But the distance is narrowing.
In a scenario where they do not have all those laws and they still keep the "1850 mindset" they will eventually have better products at lower prices.
> Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
Data taken from? Of course this depends on the activity, but no matter what you do, there will still be first, secondary and tertiary sectors. Mostly tertiary for developed countries, but you still support from the others...
I am not proposing to work 80 hours per week, in fact. I am just giving you awareness of what is coming right now. As long as we have something else to offer it will be ok (I do not think we have much more to offer anymore, that can be sustained in the next 20-30 years unless we do a shift in mindset). The distance is narrowing a lot and that means that at some point... did you see how many strategic sectors around all Europe chinese bought? From harbours to business, etc.?
I don't think you're aware that this has been known for over a century. For one example:
"Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons" - https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo... .
] More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.
] In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.
Or, see the chapter in McConnell's "Rapid Development", at https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/600/... . Page 601 under "don't require overtime; it will produce less total output" describes why, with pointers.
These are specifically speaking to software developers because those are the resources I know best.
Programmers aren't special - these factors are generally true for middle-class jobs and manufacturing jobs (as Ford's research showed in the 1920s.)
If you believe otherwise, where's your data?
BTW, going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism". Some of the ways that overtime can cause presenteeism are: working while tired due to lack of sleep, migraines from stress, feeling pressured to go to work while sick, lower general health and well-being from lack of exercise/fun, and paying bills and doing other personal tasks while at work.
A gross but meaningful estimate could be per-capita evolution (though there are other factors, such as not leading the economy which gives you advantage to catch up).
If the hole keeps narrowing... :)
> going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism"
I do not fundamentally disagree with this. I do know performance is not exclusively tied to the number of hours worked. And also burnout can do bad things to you. But if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way, probably the cost/benefit is not proportional to the extra hours but it will show a trend overall.
Simply put as more work becomes thinking/creative long hours are going to harm productivity.
Past about 40 hours / week, across a wide range of jobs, it's more cost effective to hire new employees than to take the marginal reduction in performance.
> per-capita evolution
Like the early days of the Soviet Union, when the country went from being one of the most backward countries of Europe to having space travel? Is that your metric?
Regardless, you haven't presented data, only conjectured that such data exists.
> if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way
Your "if" carries a lot of weight.
You need to show that such a country exists. Present data please.
Here's are more examples of how 80 hours/week is not realistic for an entire country's workforce.
"The Productivity of Working Hours", John Pencavel, The Economic Journal, Volume 125, Issue 589, 1 December 2015, Pages 2052–2076, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166 and https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
] The estimates above on the output-hours relationship suggest that, for most [observed British munitions workers during WWI], weekly output rises with weekly hours of work although, after a point, the increase in output declines as more hours are worked. This point where the marginal product starts to decline varies with the workers and with the work done. For hours of 48 or less, weekly output tends to be proportional to weekly hours worked and the decline in the marginal product of hours occurs after 48 weekly hours.
See the Marginal Product of Hours in Table 5? After about 48 hours, it's better for the company to hire someone else. After about 65 hours per week, the marginal value is negative. See also Table 4 "Implied Output-Hours Relations Corresponding to Two Fitted Spline Functions".
Or from "The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper", Lonnie Golden (2011) at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro...
] Shepard and Clifton (2000) established that manufacturing productivity does not necessarily improve when hours are lengthened. Their empirical study of aggregate panel data for 18 manufacturing industries within the US economy suggests that the use of overtime hours actually lowers average productivity, measured as output per worker hour, for almost all of the industries in the sample, even when the data are controlled or corrected. More precisely, a 10-per cent increase in overtime resulted, on average, in a 2.4-per cent decrease in productivity measured by hourly output.
] Indeed, it appears that in many, if not most, industries in the United States, shorter hours are actually associated with higher rates of output per hour (Holman et al., 2008, see Figure 1). ...
] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).
Or for South Kor...
Life just isn't work, but work is one part of life. Work maximalists seem to forget this.
Climate refugee waves, climate wars, working for worthless money to rent property the old generations pension funds hold hostage to keep the facade up for another year.
Why should anyone pour the limited good years they have into this, to appease a lifestyle reality that will be out of stock no matter what?
Why try to be part of the kings court and in favor, when they open a head bowling alley on the place de concorde?
I really do not get the appeal of this self-hypnotizing mindset. Do you think one can will reality into a different shape, by the powers of believe alone?
China is coming undone as we write.
Go home, schedule a meetup with your parents, family, friend, anyone.
Hold your loved ones, while the world goes.
This party is over.
Because working more overtime lowers average productivity. That's a reason why Ford switched to a 40-hour week even though he wasn't legally required to do so.
And its likely is a factor for why "South Korea has the fastest shortening working time in the OECD" and "[in China] work hours have reportedly been falling for about three decades due to rising productivity, better labor laws, and the spread of the two-day weekend." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time
> I myself have even worked 22 hours in a row
Sure. But don't mix short exceptions like this with derision about 40hr/weeks and "when Korean and Chinese overtake us", because those are two entirely different topics.
No, I do not try to mix it. Just the news looked like a bit out of context to me.
I do not know what they found when they started to inspect and how urgent it is to fix or whatever whatever they found, but I guess that Musk is not carrying with him a whip and making everyone sleep in-office systematically.
It could be perfectly a peak of work for some reason. but it looks like they try to mean something else.
> but I guess that Musk is not carrying with him a whip and making everyone sleep in-office systematically
Sweatshop bosses don't usually carry whips either, so your hyperbolic analogy doesn't really seem that meaningful.
“Hmm Elon has a reputation for not liking hard workers (the comment in his book about him getting mad the spacex parking lot wasn’t sufficiently busy on a Saturday), he’s doing a massive layoff, he’s stated this random goal (finish this or get fired)…..hmmm….ok team let’s do this: photograph me sleeping and post it, and then if I don’t get fired for being perceived as working hard, I’ll make sure you’re protected too”.
There is zero chance you’d post a twitter photo of your boss in that setting without pre clearing their permission. Also, as a former investment banker, I’ve slept under my desk a few times and always kept a sleeping bag hidden away. If you’re actually working hard you know how you do this? You either close and lock your office door, or go out of your way to obscure what you’re doing….no one wants to know or see you’re sleeping at the office like an animal.
Of course that’s the most skeptical least trustful view. Still, let’s take a grain of salt. The amount of PR she’s generated from that picture is massive. Assume she gets fired now; due to preempting with the sleeping on the floor pic, it’d cause a massive backlash. So in a way she purchased insurance, if you want to be cynical, for herself in a very calculated way.
I’d switch positions in a heartbeat, and I have good work like balance but only make a fifth of that. Cry me a river.
One of the best places to sleep is in the server room, the white noise from all the fans is quite soothing.