I absolutely love my job. I just also love everything else in my life. The productivity difference of 30 vs 40 hours is not that big, but the difference it would make to my life is monumental.
The productivity difference I think is controversial. Some (most?) of the biggest tech companies have a grind culture. If working 60 hours per week isn’t productive, why is Apple, Tesla, Netflix, etc so successful?
I’ve had the full range of experiences (full time work or 20-30 hours of freelance work) and they are just different, not necessarily better
> If working 60 hours per week isn’t productive, why is Apple, Tesla, Netflix, etc so successful?
Why do you think that just the amount of hours worked per week dictate how successful a whole company is? You are focusing on one very basic metric to derive a very complex conclusion...
I have family that work at Apple and Amazon. Both Apple family say its a grind (especially with frequent multi-week trips to china). The amazon family member says it depends on which team you're on.
All these tech companies are RTO, on-call schedules, and "high seasons" (Prime Day, product release days, etc.).
> The productivity difference I think is controversial.
Sure. The diminishing labor returns (from fewer rest days) are less expensive than onboarding sufficient personnel.
But the most sensical understanding of worker productivity is that it slopes downward as the number of consecutive workdays stretches onward. Productivity trends higher at 30 hours than it does is at 40 hours.
Nothing else I like gets all my best hours for even three days a week, let alone five.
It’s nutty to me that if I like my job I must want to spend more than half the week doing it. There’s nothing—nothing—I like well enough that I want to devote more than 50% of my best hours a week to it… every single week indefinitely.
I can love my job and still not want to do more than 20 hours a week of it. Those aren’t contradictory feelings.
No, advocating for a 30-hour workweek isn't just about not enjoying one's job. It's about people who feel they don't have enough time left for things that are important to them but don't provide financial compensation. It's also about those who are passionate about their work but still experience burnout because they don't get enough rest. There are many other reasons, too.
If your job aligns perfectly with what you'd do in your spare time, you might not see the appeal of a shorter workweek. But that doesn't mean others don't enjoy their work — they might just be overworked and need more balance in their lives.
For me, it's just the opposite. I enjoy my work very much and like to work very intensively for 30 hours, usually at least 10 hours per day, and deliver lots of value. Then take a long break, spending time with family and hobby projects.
Yeah fair point, in blue collar and trades there's definitely a shortage. Hopefully more people will see trades as a career path instead of getting a bachelor in human resources management.
I wonder if that's actually a good idea. The best time to start learning a skill/trade (includes white collar stuff) seems to be when it's not YET in demand.
For example, the worst time to start learning software development was at its covid peak in 2018/2019.
If trades are going to be in huge demand now, a lot of people will start learning them and in 5 years of so we're back to square one with low pay and huge competition.
Then again it still probably is more useful than bachelor in hr.
Trades are awesome "emergency" / "economy downturn" skills to have.
That was before COVID though so I think you mean 2021/2022. 2018/2019 was a perfect time to have gone through a boot camp and get just enough certifications to get hired in a 6-figure job in 2021/2022 and then to get laid off in 2023/2024.
I meant 2019 but admittedly I only know of the Polish market and choices most "normal" (statistically) people make - which is to study the thing at the university without getting any job experience in the meantime.
Here bootcamps were something maybe 1-2% of people did.
So if you started in 2019 you'd be graduating right into the "layoff" market in which juniors have virtually no possibility to get hired.
The existence of layoffs has little bearing on if there is a shortage of skilled workers. A layoff in marketing does not imply that a shortage of surgeons cannot exist.
Yet hiring portals programmatically reject viable job applicants for being the wrong age, for insufficient job history for unskilled jobs, for multitudes of other irrelevancies kept secret in a black box.
I think it could potentially have had a cultural effect. Right now, working 50 hours feels like "going the extra mile" because you know the standard is 40. Well, maybe 40 hours would have become that extra mile.
I believe the pandemic moved most white collar work to work from home. This has allowed softer work requirements in terms of hours and needs to step away from the desk.
Seeing posts of employers imposing spyware to monitor employee keystrokes / time at the desk should serve as warnings and must be pushed back. Historically, pushing back meant union-driven actions. WFH brings a challenge to how union-seeking employees will organize moving forward.
I believe we should absolutely push for 30 hour workweeks or 4 day weeks.
Between dog walking, grocery store trips, attending to children, most people are working <= 30 hours from home as it is
(If you're in office, replace that with walks around the building, coffee/smoke breaks, long lunches, hanging out in your co-workers cube talking about whatever...)
For people who can do those (mostly the ones doing creative activities, such as software, marketing, etc.) the 30 or 40-hour week doesn’t matter anyway. This is more important for service jobs or physically intensive jobs, where the hours spent on the job may correlate pretty heavily with the total work done by the worker.
This certainly isn't the impression I have. Work from home increased a great deal and still isn't the majority of hours.
BLS has pretty clear statistics for the whole workforce, I didn't find one that broke out salaried positions (which is an okay proxy for white collar, though not great).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 (“The Act authorized and directed the President to issue an order stabilizing prices, wages and salaries to the levels they had had as of September 15, 1942, and to issue additional regulations related to the Act.”) might have had a few more provisions and it would have been reinstated after the war.
Many countries have legal mechanisms to limit freedoms if the sitation calls for it.
For some jobs, hours worked isn't a practical measure of productivity or value. I used to pick orders in a warehouse. The more hours I worked, the more orders they shipped, the more orders they could take, the more profit they could reap.
Now I work as a data analyst. I have some required duties spelled out in my position description, plus a catch-all "requests from other divisions as assigned." If I'd spend more hours working, nothing would really change. The only guaranteed value for each hour they're paying me is having me on call that hour. Which is worth something, I guess, but good luck calculating it.
Did you know the average human spends 2,555 hours a year sleeping? In a country like America that is 851,581,500,000 hours wasted. Think about the productivity !!!
There is commuting to and from work - but we can't optimise that one out ...
Have you tried it ? I worked part time for years (32 hours instead of 40), it's a completely different lifestyle. I had my wednesday off which meant I never worked more than two days in a row, when you go back to full time it's definitely significant, more than you would expect
Sounds like an interesting concept, a "work as you please" approach where compensation is unrelated to your hours worked (and ofcourse it being at least some livable amount).
I see a lot of cynicism about “code monkey” and privilege. For physical labor, 8h with mandatory breaks is possible. For the “code monkey”, it is scientifically known that brain can’t focus and perform well for more than 4h. In addition the soul killing meetings and the wasted commutes also sap one’s mental energy.
That all being said, such disdain for knowledge work in this thread is immensely alarming. Also, the example of going to another cubicle, chatting with colleagues, getting a coffee, going to the loo etc are for people in Corp where it is easy to hide your incompetence, for rest of us plebs, those are bs that probably count up to may be 15 minutes.
On most days, I barely have time to complete enough pending reviews and doing my own stuff on top of useless meetings watching management flexing their arms on turf wars and irrelevant processes, after which am brain dead.
At my workplace, only people spending 1h on coffee break and chitchatting or smoking are just management discussing their life and family, for us, such discussions are left for after work when we are still alive for a walk.
Also this hour thing sounds to me suspiciously like a build up for statistics that, meatbags are so unproductive and lazy, look how our chatbot can gurgle stackoverflow examples in adequately coherent manner to replace all these lazy monkies.
Disclaimer: Opinions are my own, you have right to disagree and share your constructive criticism.
Because the hacker-nature of knowledge work subverts all other work and tries to leach the profitability out of all other work towards itself? It grows.. and wonders allowed why everyone else grows hostile towards the growth..
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI’ve had the full range of experiences (full time work or 20-30 hours of freelance work) and they are just different, not necessarily better
Why do you think that just the amount of hours worked per week dictate how successful a whole company is? You are focusing on one very basic metric to derive a very complex conclusion...
I don't think it's axiomatic.
Finance is a completely different beast, and even there many of the big ones don't overwork their employees with 60+ hours/week.
All these tech companies are RTO, on-call schedules, and "high seasons" (Prime Day, product release days, etc.).
Sure. The diminishing labor returns (from fewer rest days) are less expensive than onboarding sufficient personnel.
But the most sensical understanding of worker productivity is that it slopes downward as the number of consecutive workdays stretches onward. Productivity trends higher at 30 hours than it does is at 40 hours.
It’s nutty to me that if I like my job I must want to spend more than half the week doing it. There’s nothing—nothing—I like well enough that I want to devote more than 50% of my best hours a week to it… every single week indefinitely.
I can love my job and still not want to do more than 20 hours a week of it. Those aren’t contradictory feelings.
If your job aligns perfectly with what you'd do in your spare time, you might not see the appeal of a shorter workweek. But that doesn't mean others don't enjoy their work — they might just be overworked and need more balance in their lives.
Then again it still probably is more useful than bachelor in hr. Trades are awesome "emergency" / "economy downturn" skills to have.
That was before COVID though so I think you mean 2021/2022. 2018/2019 was a perfect time to have gone through a boot camp and get just enough certifications to get hired in a 6-figure job in 2021/2022 and then to get laid off in 2023/2024.
So if you started in 2019 you'd be graduating right into the "layoff" market in which juniors have virtually no possibility to get hired.
Yet hiring portals programmatically reject viable job applicants for being the wrong age, for insufficient job history for unskilled jobs, for multitudes of other irrelevancies kept secret in a black box.
Seeing posts of employers imposing spyware to monitor employee keystrokes / time at the desk should serve as warnings and must be pushed back. Historically, pushing back meant union-driven actions. WFH brings a challenge to how union-seeking employees will organize moving forward.
I believe we should absolutely push for 30 hour workweeks or 4 day weeks.
(If you're in office, replace that with walks around the building, coffee/smoke breaks, long lunches, hanging out in your co-workers cube talking about whatever...)
BLS has pretty clear statistics for the whole workforce, I didn't find one that broke out salaried positions (which is an okay proxy for white collar, though not great).
At my office it's the rare exception.
Many countries have legal mechanisms to limit freedoms if the sitation calls for it.
Just no idea how to measure it.
Hours at laptop? Hours thinking about it? A 1 min slack reply at 8pm, does that count as 1min?
I could argue that I work anywhere between 25 and 60 hr / week.
I could argue that some weeks I work 300 hrs, some weeks 0 (feels like -60) hours.
I'm afraid it's not precise. It's more of a happiness-based metric (for me and the client).
As code monkeys we have it easy but it's far from the norm
Now I work as a data analyst. I have some required duties spelled out in my position description, plus a catch-all "requests from other divisions as assigned." If I'd spend more hours working, nothing would really change. The only guaranteed value for each hour they're paying me is having me on call that hour. Which is worth something, I guess, but good luck calculating it.
If 30 is better than 40, why not a 10 or 5 hour workweek?
Is there anything special about working 5 days a week ? Why not 7 days like we had back in the good ol days ?
And what about kids ? They use to work at 10 years old now they just sit on their asses until 18+...
Do we even need or want vacation days ? Think about the productivity !!!
There is commuting to and from work - but we can't optimise that one out ...
Remote work, building housing that's closer to the office, high-speed public transit, etc.
4 to 3 days, your productivity would go down 25%, and your vacation up 33% (3 to 4 days), so it's still interesting I guess but seems more balanced.
3 to 2 days, your productivity would go down 33%, but you only get 25% more off days (4 to 5 days).
My incredibly scientific analysis says that it would make sense down to 3 days a week, or 22.5 hours, but not so much after that.
It's special because that's not 40 hours. More free time.
That all being said, such disdain for knowledge work in this thread is immensely alarming. Also, the example of going to another cubicle, chatting with colleagues, getting a coffee, going to the loo etc are for people in Corp where it is easy to hide your incompetence, for rest of us plebs, those are bs that probably count up to may be 15 minutes.
On most days, I barely have time to complete enough pending reviews and doing my own stuff on top of useless meetings watching management flexing their arms on turf wars and irrelevant processes, after which am brain dead.
At my workplace, only people spending 1h on coffee break and chitchatting or smoking are just management discussing their life and family, for us, such discussions are left for after work when we are still alive for a walk.
Also this hour thing sounds to me suspiciously like a build up for statistics that, meatbags are so unproductive and lazy, look how our chatbot can gurgle stackoverflow examples in adequately coherent manner to replace all these lazy monkies.
Disclaimer: Opinions are my own, you have right to disagree and share your constructive criticism.