When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two years.
On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per week on work. Beyond that, I was not productive and so I didn't do any math-related work.
If you add the administrative overhead of a job, that might be another 5 hours at most, so about 3 full workdays. I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout.
Now, I'm just talking about mentally demanding, technical work. I can work longer if the work isn't very mentally demanding, but even so, not for more than 4-5 hours a day. And now I'm an independent content creator, so every additional hour I work is proportional to profit.
My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless, especially when it comes to fostering people in the long-term (short term is different).
I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.
> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless...
I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes.
When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours.
My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).
Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.
Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are.
Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.
That's fine but many people can't, and don't, do this. Most people I've worked with have varying degrees of how long they can pay attention and how much they can get done in a day.
It's also not just about quantity buy quality. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were doing subpar work or anything, just that there is a spectrum there. For example I had a teammate who made incredibly disruptive and positive changes to how and what my team worked on. Yet he would also arrive at work with barely a second to spare before standup and most days he would leave _at least_ an hour early. Some days he was clearly not doing much work and even pretty brazen about it if confronted about it (he wasn't a dick about it just be like, "Oh, I'm just trying to look busy"). When he did work (which was more often than I'm making it seem), he was very serious and focused about it and would put in extra time when he was really into what he was working on (this of course was not to make up all the leaving early, haha).
I feel like frontend work has some unique characteristics as opposed to hardcore backend one, at least for me. I feel like the parts of the brain that deal with visual and the analytical are not overlapping much so if I alternate between the two I can do a lot more hours of continuing work, resting one while the other centre is busy. Definitely can't do that doing hard algorithmic work, where I would clock out in just a few hours.
But I think there is something else though - frontend work is usually less abstracted and more menial - a lot of repeating various tasks, moving stuff around, fine tuning it by eye etc.
When I encounter something like this on the backend I would step back and spend time actually automating that with a function/library/package/framework and only then come back to the task at hand. Thus my time is usually more "concentrated" with making decisions, logic and calculations.
But frontends are usually so vast and complex pieces of software that its harder for me to abstract and automate away ideas, and its easier to just plow away through some visual task rather than step back, distil the logic into an abstraction and then go and use that abstraction effectively. That does happen but at least for me a lot less often than backend logic.
I would aim to distil the backend code down to its business logic and almost nothing else where possible, grinding away replication, but I (and people I've tended to work with it seems) don't seem to strive for that on the frontend for some reason, at least not in the same degree.
Which ultimately makes this environment quite a lot less mentally challenging to work in. You can "zone out" doing something and let muscle memory do its thing, whereas if I ever start to feel that working on the backend code, I have an alarm in my mind shouting "something's wrong! there's a missing abstraction!"
A trick I've used for 20+ years that I think helps me put in ~8 hours of real work per day is to reserve some easy tasks for "after lunch work". It doesn't have to be literally after lunch, but whenever your brain is tired or doesn't want to try too hard. That's when you write a couple of the boring tests or do some easy refactoring. When you're in that kind of mood, doing those kinds of familiar low-friction tasks is relaxing and refreshing. Pretty soon you're ready for something harder. And it's a way to fit in the "hygiene" jobs that are easy to neglect. It helps to keep a little list in a text file somewhere, so you don't have to go searching for them.
> It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).
I have a similar experience working remotely. I can be productive 40+ hours a week without getting drained.
But this includes making rather long breaks between blocks of work. Usually this ends up in blocks of ~2-3hours with breaks of ~1hour in between. Although this works out my end of work is rather late (typically I work from 8am to 7pm) which leaves little time to do private things.
So in conclusion, although this works out I am looking into reducing my work hours to 30 hours per week to have a bit more time for myself.
Also worked more than 40 hrs full concentration work for few weeks, but that soon burned me out. Now I can't do that more than a day and don't ever want in future.
> I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions
Depending on how granular your tracking was, that may be the trick. It is possible that you did not count in the time needed to recover and transition time. Let say that a task took 1.5h to complete, but you didn't count in 15 minutes you needed in between to relax and gather thought or perhaps you didn't count in another 15 minutes that you needed between two separate tasks. Can you elaborate this?
I find it depends heavily onto the task. Some let's say "organizational" work (moving stuff around, adding new machines to cluster etcetera) that just requires to be done but not "hard"? Can do for hours, will get a bit slower just coz of boredom. So the first 4 hours are still more effective than next 4 hours but not as much so, especially when I take break in the middle (bless WFH)
Programming or designing something complex to program ? Way shorter. So I usually mix and match
That reasoning is complicated IMO by the fact that many jobs involve projects and tasks that are perceived as very important, yet will never be started, let alone continued, let alone completed.
That's a pretty big deal as-is. It can easily make the boss feel justified--OK this employee said we need to do this thing, they said they want to take it on, but it's not being done. The boss is in the loop and may feel like the employee wants to be pushed, checked in on, and so on.
But even then, add to this the stronger element of subjective mental torture often found at work, where the infantile pusher is none other than the self.
This element will stick the butt in the chair and turn the individual into a workaholic who sees no point in leaving to go home, because they are staying until it gets done. So still--50, 60, 80 hours in the office. Frustration, try harder. See some progress. OK, keep doing this.
Mix in a little bit of competitive thinking on the part of others ("wait, _they_ are working 50 hours even though we green-lit 25 hour weeks?") and this gets hour-reduction going sideways.
(This also relates fairly easily to persona-based theories of personality dynamics)
So much about work is about the perception of what you do and not about what is really being done. Add to that, that even when one is actually providing lots of value, it may not be perceived as important by whoever you report to - but the firefighting du jour is.
>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.
Hanlon's razor applies here.
As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter
The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this.
We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.
>We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.
Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.
Intertia is a big part of the 40 hour standard; I'd anticipate legal structures that start penalising companies that offer different hours.
One of the situations I hear a lot of chatter about is people working 2+ jobs because they can't find the hours to make ends meet. Picking on US retail hours, there seems to have been a 2nd quiet revolution that has gotten the average hours down to 30/week without quite as much bloodshed [0].
It isn't that obvious that the efforts of labour activists have had that much impact. It is unlikely that they have managed to hold back the laws of supply and demand over the long term. If companies got much better results at 60 hours/week or 20 hours/week that is how long people would be working.
Eg, look at how quickly we ended up with mass working form home. It has been a possibility for ~20 years, and it took one shock and suddenly it seems to be embedded as far as it is likely to go. No bloodshed. That is a much bigger win than a 40 hour workweek. I'll sign whatever hours you want me to pretend to work if I can do it from my bedroom. 168 hour/week contract WFH? Works for me I suppose.
> if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it.
Ok but an important detail is the distribution of those hours. You probably didn't do 7 consecutive hours of exhausting hard thinking work in one day, nor probably 3.5 hours across 2 days... you'll be able to confirm, but sounds to me like an important key part of most meaningful, intensively intellectual (or physical) work lots of people do is that those hours are more-or-less spread across the whole work week, so in your example, kind of 1h30m per day on a 5-day week or closer to 2h/day on a 4-day week.
I would fully agree with the latter part of your comment. Even if you argue that you'd not get more than 3 days of actual work done during a week, it doesn't necessarily follow that your work week should have been 3 days long; more like your daily timetable should probably be shorter and you should not have to wait in your office, mentally tired and not being productive, until the clock says it's 5pm and so you can now go home.
I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule.
My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.
The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach.
Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.
What are you accomplishing daily at 6-9 am when most people aren't logged in? I know there's like a lot of individual work but when do you work with other people? Do you just work less efficiently during the day you mean?
> the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.
the current system is mainly because henry ford decided that it was the most he could make people do line work before productivity decreased and injuries increased. that of course was better working conditions of 10 hour days that the labor unions had negotiated before that. it's not impossible to forsee it going down to 32 hours or working more at home since the nature of work is different.
That article is whitewashing. There were demands for 8 hour work days decades before Ford. 10 hours had become widespread, sure, and some only asked for 10, but Robert Owen's slogan "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest" dates to 1817, and had been picked up by unions and socialist groups over the following decades.
May 1st as an international day for workers demonstrations even came about as a result of the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in 1886 during one of the demonstrations for the 8 hour day. The then AFL proposed May 1st demonstrations as part of relaunching the fight for the 8 hour day.
That some employers saw the writing on the wall and cut it to 8 with less pressure applied than others was in large part because the multiple decades long, sometimes bloody, fight for earlier cuts had shown it did not affect production anywhere near as much as opponents had claimed.
Personally, I have been observing my own technical work habits a lot recently. What I have noticed agrees with your narrative but disagrees with your point. Here's the rundown:
* I can sustain hard mental labor (including but not limited to work) for about 50 hours per week total
* I don't know when I'm going to be in the best state to do that work, and it depends on a lot of factors
* Some of those factors are external, some depend on the project, etc.
* Sometimes, that mental labor needs to go somewhere else, and that subtracts from my overall work budget. That includes things like weird social situations, fixing something around the house, etc.
* I also spend a lot of time passively daydreaming about the last thing I worked on. This is often productive, but also often isn't.
* My productive output also varies a lot on those factors: some weeks, I can produce 60 hours of work, and others only 15-20
I think if you have bursty work patterns like this, it is actually beneficial to have more office days rather than fewer, to "catch" as much productive time and daydreaming time as possible. However, it's an even better argument for remote work, because that minimizes other forms of mental labor, like driving.
The productivity in office suits certain work styles that are people heavy. The argument for and against remote work isn't as dependent on the productivity time as people think. Sure, some people are unproductive for periods between 9am - 5pm. Most people are not. That's why those times work. I am myself very productive during those times but only for analytical work. When I need to code, I have to be home with ANC earphones and get lost in the iterations (assuming I'm not stuck somewhere).
The whole idiocy around 5 days a week 9-5 is because people think you have to be in office all that time. People can and do take random half days, hours off to go to the dentist or the doctor or to the post office or whatever the fuck. That's how it has always been. There are very few jobs that require you to literally never fuck off if there's nothing going on. Work adjusts around you if you're a productive person. Some of us can get stuck with shitty bosses and everyone empathizes with that, but for the vast majority of folks, the boss absolutely does not give a flying fuck about when you come in as long as he knows you're disciplined.
I think I'm like this. I've pushed myself fairly hard with technical work in the past, and got up to about 80 hours a week for weeks at a time, but about 50 is my useful maximum without diminishing returns.
To add to your anecdote: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species with a day that ran: Breakfast and a walk; 90 minutes of writing; spending time with his wife reading their letters and a novel; another 90 minutes of writing; and lunch.
After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games.
For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.
Darwin was born to a rich family and the book was published when he was 50. I guess I see the point you're trying to make, but his life was very much not like the average person. It was also over 150 years ago; the world he lived in was so far different from 2023 it's absurd. I don't understand why you would use an example of someone extra-ordinary, a geo/biologist no less, in a critique of hustle culture.
There's also that we once had a society where one person in a household worked 8 hours a day and one did house chores (including raising kids) for 8 hours a day.
In a modern, fair society, that should translate into both people working 4 hours a day and house chores 4 hours a day.
Unfortunately the reality right now is we're pushing both people to each work 12 hours a day AND do 4 hours of chores on top of that.
There’s also the argument that you could live off of one salary and downsize / live frugally (two-income trap), but things are more expensive (e.g. the world is more safe now, but that also makes it more expensive).
I agree with the 20 - 25 hours of productive mental work per week.
So much of my day is wasted with meetings that could be an email. The worst are recurring weekly meetings. Why?
Tomorrow I have meeting starting from 9am. From 9-5 I only have 1.5 hours that are not meetings and they are not concurrent, they are 3 30 minute blocks between meetings. I have an insane deadline I am trying to make in 2 weeks. How am I supposed to get any work done if I am constantly in meetings? I feel like companies should designate at most 2 hours a day as meeting hours, after that let tech workers build tech, its not right to fill days with meetings and then expect us to produce at night.
My last job had almost no meetings it was awesome. I really only worked maybe 20 hours a week but it was solid deep work. Its been a year and the company CTO still reaches out occasionally to see if I want a position for various projects they have coming up.
If you let developers just work when they are in work mode you will get solid results.
She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour.
Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work).
When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”.
An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.
This speaks to the "labor" argument made above. More efficiency means harder work, but it must also be less work, unless we are trying to extract more from workers.
OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.
The main reason for meddle management existence is a recursive loop.
The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.
> I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.
Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people")
The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.
> I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout.
This is similar to my experience.
Back in 2020 I decided to make a career switch from accounting to software engineering. I began studying in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening while working a full-time job. I quickly discovered that I could only study in the morning with a lighter review in the evening.
Eventually, I got to the point where I had to walk away from work and study full-time because it was so mentally exhausting. Around that time, I started learning Greek as well. I attended classes once per week and observed that I had to lighten my CompSci studying workload on days I had Greek class. Otherwise, I would have a high degree of difficulty learning Greek that evening.
I was hitting my mental exhaustion limit after 5 hours of intense, technical learning every day. If I tried to push past that point, I would burn myself out and become noticeably less productive. This was something I had never realized while in school with frequent built in breaks (and perhaps more energy from being younger).
When I was studying for the CPA exam in the library for 8 hours per day, I thought I was being highly efficient the entire time. However, looking back on it, I was spending a good portion of that time taking breaks and doing lighter review of material I already knew, which was not too taxing (pun intended) on my mental energy.
Now, I’m well aware of my upper limits of hard work and find that forcing myself past that point isn’t worth the trade-off of mental exhaustion. I realistically believe that I could switch to a 4 day work week and accomplish the same amount while being more energized in the long-run. I’d love to get the opportunity to test my hypothesis.
As a side note: I found when I was studying full-stack material, switching between backend and front end work when I began to tire of one slowed the rate of my mental exhaustion.
Your conclusions don’t follow. Most people are not doing exclusively mentally demanding technical work, which you admit, so why would you limit the work week based on that? And non strenuous work takes a nontrivial amount of time? I’m regularly solidly productive for 30-40 hours a week (tracked with RescueTime app).
Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanup, or migration config flags over various repos). It wasn’t hard work, but it’s important work that has to get done. Shortening the week doesn’t magically get this done faster.
A lot of time spent doing "hard" things is unproductive. So many times I've worked on a hard bug long fruitless hours just to come back the next day and spotting the problem almost immediately. Quick cleanup tasks are important yes, but most of the time you can delegate those to newer employees that can actually learn from them.
I’m doing a phd in informatics. 4 hours per weekday of actual work is what I have found to be my sustainable limit. Not sure I could even do this 5 days a week, more like 3 or 4.
what about useful jobs which are not productive (in terms of monetization of the time units worked) nor physically demanding?
I guess 4 days work for a librarian doesn't mean anything meaningful and the said librarian productivity doesn't plummet like in a "writing math papers" scenario.
Or for an emergency doctor, a fireman, a shop owner, a sportsman etc. etc.
A friend of mine is an air traffic controller, they work 8 hours straight in 3 8 hours shifts during the 24h they need to cover constantly (meaning they don't even stop for a lunch break, only a few short 10 minutes breaks to stretch or to go to the bathroom) for 5 days straight and then they stay 3 days and 1/2 home, so they work 17-18 days a month.
Anyway 9-5 (which is more like 8-~16 in my Country on average, with an hour long lunch break, so ~36 hours/week in total) was won by workers with actual real social battles and 9-5 is the time of the day where the presence of natural light is more probable.
We could switch to working 23:00-6:00 but I guess it wouldn't be so good for the morale.
Also, I generally really work no more than 1-2 hours per day, the rest is spent thinking about the problem, reading documentation, watching a tutorial, participating in a meeting when I do not have to talk an I can keep the camera turned off and the mic on mute, but mostly is doing something else entirely, completely disconnected from my duties, to enable my brain to absorb the problem and have a fresh view on it sometimes later.
Best ideas happen when you're not actively thinking about them.
I read somewhere that the 9-5 workweek was first implemented before the emancipation of women. whether it’s true or not I do not know, but it’s an interesting artifact to consider
What you write might be true for working only with your mind, but it is absolutely possible to work efficiently all day every day for several months in other fields, that are not only grunt style work. And when it comes to seasonal work, it is the most reasonable way to do it. You can work also work long hours efficiently if you are forced to it.
> > My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless...
If there are people who can't run a mile and those who can run over 100, what makes you think everyone universally can sustain 20-25 hours of focussed work per week?
If I do 20-25 hours a week, and nobody else can outperform me in productive output, I don't really care how much hours they put in.
I've had jobs where I was productive maybe 4 hours a week, and got excellent reviews. So I always wondered if I got that, WTF were the other devs doing?
for programming work I would say 20-25 hours a week on complicated things, and an extra 5 - 10 hours on simple things.
The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.
thanks for you input, i'd just want to add a pinch of chaos and averages into the mix.. a 9-5 is also an escape from problems elsewhere, or a somehow balanced dance/wave (morning, commute, work, come back), it's not just late stage capitalism imo
I’ve gone down to 4 days, taking Fridays off to look after my son, and I certainly won’t be going back to 5 days until he’s in school. Looking after a toddler all day isn’t exactly a day off, but it is extremely rewarding, and something I’d recommend to any parent thinking about dropping down a day.
It definitely has some downsides however, I’m the only one in the team that’s off that day, so there’s usually meetings and information that I miss out on, as well as a 20% cut in pay, but I’m very lucky to be in a position where we could afford it, and the time with my son is worth it.
Based on most of the studies i’ve seen, at least for office/information jobs, that pay cut is unjustified. People mostly get as much done in 4 days as 5.
Usual counterpoint is that you're not being paid just for the things you get done, but also for availability - for being there when there's a need to handle something unexpected. This has real value to a business, so you being available for 80% of the time justifies some degree of pay cut.
It may be "justified" while five days remains the norm, as it may be possible to get similarly-capable employees to take the position for lower pay, to get that extra day off every week. This should provide a pretty big benefit to companies that can leverage it while five is still typical (assuming that the shift to four is in fact going to become a trend)
I actually work 6 days a week (only Sunday off) noon until midnight with a two hour break 5-7pm.
That’s 60 hrs of work a week, but I get to spend every morning 7am-noon with my kids. It’s been a great change of pace for me personally. We have a garden we do as a family, I can do doc appointments, some field trips, etc. while still working extremely hard. It’s not for everyone, but that schedule has been great for me personally.
I support it, as long as you’re well compensated and you like it. I think due to wanting to “stick it to the man” there can be too much anti-work sentiment.
It’s okay if it’s a throw away side project but not okay if it’s for your employer? Wat. Seems like a silly distinction and backward if anything.
I definitely don’t work as much as you but I also love my work and work random odd hours and sometimes voluntarily extra. I like it and it’s definitely paid of dividends for my career growth.
Fact is, some people can just work harder than others. This is obvious is it not? It is not because some people are lazy and others aren't. It is not a moral issue. Some people just have higher energy levels in my experience (I'm not one of them, as a type this at 8pm nearly comatose). They just have more capacity. I think it is genetic.
I did this, then when my son went to school, kept the day off. It's super valuable to just get some time for yourself. Have recently changed career and gone back full time, but pining for that extra time (luckily my company seems to be thinking about a 4 day week)
This doesn’t make sense to me unless it moves you into a lower tax bracket or something. Eg. If you made $100k and were taxed at 30%, you’d get paid net $70k. If you took a 20% gross pay cut, you’d get paid $80k gross and $56k net. 56k is 20% less than 70k.
In America I would really like to see people balance work and life better, and normalizing a 4 day workweek would go a long way to help that. We have a business culture and set of laws that I think results most people sacrificing too much life to get stuff that doesn’t make them happy.
BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours. Sometimes working more many hours is exponentially more productive. Some people want to work many more hours to get more money, maybe because working more doesn’t bother them, maybe because they’d rather have the money, whatever.
I think people want “how many hours should humans work” to have a unified answer, when in reality it ranges from 0 to 100 depending on the person (what they want and what they can do) and situation(e.g some peoples jobs are literally life saving, an extra few hours can be life-or-death).
For example: I believe the most productive time of my life, by far and above, was the time I worked insanely long hours, and in fact those hours were exponential since knowledge work and the fruits of knowledge work often compound.
Now watch how many people tell me my experience is wrong and I’m either lying or delusional, just because they don’t want to believe that sometimes long hours really are more productive.
> BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours.
Blue collar jobs do scale linearly. Many white collar jobs do not, though self-reportedly.
But linear or not in itself is not a problem. If it is linear for a certain job, then there simply must be more people employed. Which is always a good thing, since our system has a baseline unemployment almost by design. People in unemployment but wanting to work are miserable and usually exploited when they do find work. Some businesses won't be able to be profitable without exploiting their workers, but this has historically happened every time workers gained some rights.
I think most folks, especially the ones I’ve spoken to on the issue—specifically object to the idea that more than 40 hours nets any real gain for KNOWLEDGE work. Results may vary. I don’t think anyone is arguing for example that our paramedics aren’t doing anything useful after 40 hours.
That’s the key distinction and as someone who has worked a distinctly bullshit job his entire career; I’m not rushing to spend any more time than I need to sitting at that desk.
I still argue against this for all knowledge work. I keep seeing this term “bullshit jobs” and need to probably look more into it, but it seems to refer to office jobs where huge amounts of time are wasted on unproductive work. I’ve had this kind of work in the past. But not all knowledge work is like this.
I’m a software engineer, and on some of the big projects I’ve been on I have squeezed massive amounts of real productivity out of long long hours. I know managers, bankers, real estate agents, and lawyers who also work long hours and get significantly more done for it. They take an hour less of work per day and start to legitimately fall behind (maybe that’s a good litmus test for how “bullshit” job is? How much time can you take off before it becomes noticeable?). The reality is a spectrum and we shouldn’t bring down some subset in favor of another.
Honestly if knowledge workers are sort of dialing it in unhappily with minimal productivity after X hours and labor/service/on-call workers can keep plugging away for Y>X hours then there might be some win-win there in terms of quality of life and wage inflation.
I think it's worth considering that, in the US, the ultimate leap from 5 to 4 day work weeks would require a change in labor laws to mandate full-time status and overtime pay cutoff at 32 hours/week. Close to 60% of US workers are hourly. I can't predict all of the ramifications from that kind of change, but I have to imagine it would largely benefit workers. I wish we had a major political party that was at least willing to start the conversation. We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people).
>We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people).
The more and more I see cases like this that exist, the more I feel it's yet more supporting evidence that the US is a failing democracy. We can point fingers and play responsibility games, we can claim its minority protection (are wealthy and powerful individuals really a minority that need more protection in our current structure or should they even be considered a minority), but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to be working in some respects. If we aren't seeing labor law improvements and most fall in labor, something seems amiss.
I'm not advocating for mob rule, there are very good reasons for minority protections, but in some cases when the majority of a democratic society abhors the state of affairs yet we continually have no significant influence to at least try something different, that to me says we're in a failing or failed democracy charading around as a democracy. The older I get, the more I want to call a duck a duck if it walks, quacks, and looks like a duck.
To make this claim about the US is to overlook that basically all western countries have 40 hour work weeks.
Are they all failing democracies too?
Its a shame how many Americans are too busy hating America to look outside the border and see how good they have it, but also how most of their “uniquely American” problems are not unique at all.
(My perspective is as an Australian living in America. And my comment doesn’t apply to guns.)
To be pedantic, the US has never been a democracy, it has always been a republic and it was built in to give land equal or more power than individuals. Though I don’t deny that it seems to be either in or approaching a failure mode (though perhaps the observant may notice it never worked as it was advertised even from Day 1, there was never really a success mode).
It’s lets you have 3 shifts per day (3 x 8 = 24) for full coverage. That also fits with the idea that it gave you a balanced life. 8 hours at work, 8 hours asleep, 8 hours for the rest.
It was a convenient number below the old, much worse, standard.
People act like 40 hours is some kind of natural law that can’t be questioned.
40 hours really has to due with overtime rates, advocated by progressive companies back in the day. 20 years ago, Progressive companies advocated for company gyms, day-care, unlimited M&Ms and ping-pong tables. Now, its work from home (for now.)
Otherwise can we question the need to differentiate full-time vs part-time? Its certainly arbitrary, and mostly related to whether one qualifies for benefits. In the case of benefits, it may be less than 40 hours.
It's the one thing I miss most from working for Dutch companies: being able to take a 20% pay cut and work 20% less.
Theoretically, that should be a great deal for my employer: the extra rest, and just the way productive work is usually spread out across the week, means that my productivity definitely was not down 20% compared to now, so I was cheaper per hour.
Yet even that culturally seems to be a hard sell in a majority-North American org, let alone keeping pay the same. Shame.
In Germany, during the pandemic, the company went into "Kurzarbeit" for 6 months. We worked at 70%, but because of support and client issues, we couldn't just take one full day off and another half day, so we just worked around 5-6 hours a day.
Not only that the productivity didn't decrease, but after a while we were even more productive than before. Meetings were reduced to the minimum and depending on when you started and where you worked, when you finished you had almost a full day available for yourself. These were some of the best 6 months of my employee career.
In the 90s my girlfriend worked for the American office of a Danish industrial design company that closed at noon on Fridays. They claimed it was how everyone in Denmark worked, but I had no way to confirm it at the time.
I worked in various places in Northern Germany a few years ago, close to the Danish border. Some businesses and most federal and state-related institutions would stop working at noon on Fridays. I was told it was to alleviate the pressure on the trains and Autobahn. This would make sense, especially given the fact that a very important military population was stationed there during the cold war and the railways and roads were a mess (and probably still are).
I don't know if it's true, nobody concerned would ever come to the stupid idea of questioning this nice practice.
Can you explain what you mean when you say you only work for 4?
In the UK where this trial was run both the employer and the employee pay for National Insurance which covers nationalised healthcare. Whether you work 1 day or 7 a week, you still get covered.
Healthcare is not part of compensation, it's a basic modern human need that societies should take care of. That your system doesn't work that way tells more about your system than what healthcare is.
Dock it off my paycheck too, I don't care, I want that 4-day work week!
Though of course, being in the Netherlands, my employer doesn't pay for my health insurance.
Edit: as for the general point about compensation being more than salary, it is also common in the Netherlands that PTO is prorated to the hours you work per week. That is fine; I'm happy to scale everything down to 4/5th if I can scale my working hours down to that.
That's only a problem if you believe that the 33rd hour is as productive as the 23rd hour, which isn't the case. We're talking about 4 day work weeks, not 4 hour work weeks.
If civilization isn't moving to improve quality of life, but to make sure that we keep working more and more, we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the point of technological progress.
I wholeheartedly agree. Our time here on Earth is limited, and I think that as a society we should aim to work less and have more time for ourselves and enjoy everyting life has to offer.
The huge productivity increase in the last 40 years have been entirely siphoned into maximizing profits while working conditions have remained essentially stagnant, so I'd say it's about time to start making some progress on this front.
Seems like the answer is total amount of human life. When you had 10K humans you could just walk around your cave and find enough food for everyone.
When you had 10M humans you started tilling fields and created organizations to manage collection and storage. now you need incredibly complex machines, that require incredibly complex supply chains to feed 10B.
(food as an example. its the same for clothing to not freeze, shelter to rear offsprings, culture to not kill each other etc)
Hello fellow Bertrand Russell fan??! I don't see his name come up on HN too often but really nice to see In Praise of Idleness mentioned. For anyone reading this who wants to consume some of his philosophy:
Why would they want to return? One you do an “upgrade” in your life, i.e. like remote work, quality family time, it’s difficult/impossible to go back.
The same is true for many other life “upgrades” like fiber internet connection, smart devices, smartphones, color TVs and so on
I'm one of those people, but I still prefer 4 days. I can then work on something else on the 5th day which I normally wouldn't get to do and keep my weekends for relaxing and not side projects.
I love working for works sake. I severely miss working in an office and bumping into people and getting great ideas. I believe highly skilled software engineers in a product focused startup should not work remote if they want innovation.
Pretty much as “I love work” as it gets, and I can’t wait for the move to 4 day weeks. Work for works sake gets better when it’s highly focused when you’re in the zone and lets your mind be free for all the rest of the time.
Readit News
On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per week on work. Beyond that, I was not productive and so I didn't do any math-related work.
If you add the administrative overhead of a job, that might be another 5 hours at most, so about 3 full workdays. I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout.
Now, I'm just talking about mentally demanding, technical work. I can work longer if the work isn't very mentally demanding, but even so, not for more than 4-5 hours a day. And now I'm an independent content creator, so every additional hour I work is proportional to profit.
My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless, especially when it comes to fostering people in the long-term (short term is different).
I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.
I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes.
When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours.
My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).
Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.
Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.
It's also not just about quantity buy quality. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were doing subpar work or anything, just that there is a spectrum there. For example I had a teammate who made incredibly disruptive and positive changes to how and what my team worked on. Yet he would also arrive at work with barely a second to spare before standup and most days he would leave _at least_ an hour early. Some days he was clearly not doing much work and even pretty brazen about it if confronted about it (he wasn't a dick about it just be like, "Oh, I'm just trying to look busy"). When he did work (which was more often than I'm making it seem), he was very serious and focused about it and would put in extra time when he was really into what he was working on (this of course was not to make up all the leaving early, haha).
But I think there is something else though - frontend work is usually less abstracted and more menial - a lot of repeating various tasks, moving stuff around, fine tuning it by eye etc.
When I encounter something like this on the backend I would step back and spend time actually automating that with a function/library/package/framework and only then come back to the task at hand. Thus my time is usually more "concentrated" with making decisions, logic and calculations.
But frontends are usually so vast and complex pieces of software that its harder for me to abstract and automate away ideas, and its easier to just plow away through some visual task rather than step back, distil the logic into an abstraction and then go and use that abstraction effectively. That does happen but at least for me a lot less often than backend logic.
I would aim to distil the backend code down to its business logic and almost nothing else where possible, grinding away replication, but I (and people I've tended to work with it seems) don't seem to strive for that on the frontend for some reason, at least not in the same degree.
Which ultimately makes this environment quite a lot less mentally challenging to work in. You can "zone out" doing something and let muscle memory do its thing, whereas if I ever start to feel that working on the backend code, I have an alarm in my mind shouting "something's wrong! there's a missing abstraction!"
I have a similar experience working remotely. I can be productive 40+ hours a week without getting drained.
But this includes making rather long breaks between blocks of work. Usually this ends up in blocks of ~2-3hours with breaks of ~1hour in between. Although this works out my end of work is rather late (typically I work from 8am to 7pm) which leaves little time to do private things.
So in conclusion, although this works out I am looking into reducing my work hours to 30 hours per week to have a bit more time for myself.
Also worked more than 40 hrs full concentration work for few weeks, but that soon burned me out. Now I can't do that more than a day and don't ever want in future.
Depending on how granular your tracking was, that may be the trick. It is possible that you did not count in the time needed to recover and transition time. Let say that a task took 1.5h to complete, but you didn't count in 15 minutes you needed in between to relax and gather thought or perhaps you didn't count in another 15 minutes that you needed between two separate tasks. Can you elaborate this?
Programming or designing something complex to program ? Way shorter. So I usually mix and match
That's a pretty big deal as-is. It can easily make the boss feel justified--OK this employee said we need to do this thing, they said they want to take it on, but it's not being done. The boss is in the loop and may feel like the employee wants to be pushed, checked in on, and so on.
But even then, add to this the stronger element of subjective mental torture often found at work, where the infantile pusher is none other than the self.
This element will stick the butt in the chair and turn the individual into a workaholic who sees no point in leaving to go home, because they are staying until it gets done. So still--50, 60, 80 hours in the office. Frustration, try harder. See some progress. OK, keep doing this.
Mix in a little bit of competitive thinking on the part of others ("wait, _they_ are working 50 hours even though we green-lit 25 hour weeks?") and this gets hour-reduction going sideways.
(This also relates fairly easily to persona-based theories of personality dynamics)
Hanlon's razor applies here.
As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter
The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this.
We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.
Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.
One of the situations I hear a lot of chatter about is people working 2+ jobs because they can't find the hours to make ends meet. Picking on US retail hours, there seems to have been a 2nd quiet revolution that has gotten the average hours down to 30/week without quite as much bloodshed [0].
It isn't that obvious that the efforts of labour activists have had that much impact. It is unlikely that they have managed to hold back the laws of supply and demand over the long term. If companies got much better results at 60 hours/week or 20 hours/week that is how long people would be working.
Eg, look at how quickly we ended up with mass working form home. It has been a possibility for ~20 years, and it took one shock and suddenly it seems to be embedded as far as it is likely to go. No bloodshed. That is a much bigger win than a 40 hour workweek. I'll sign whatever hours you want me to pretend to work if I can do it from my bedroom. 168 hour/week contract WFH? Works for me I suppose.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAERT/
Ok but an important detail is the distribution of those hours. You probably didn't do 7 consecutive hours of exhausting hard thinking work in one day, nor probably 3.5 hours across 2 days... you'll be able to confirm, but sounds to me like an important key part of most meaningful, intensively intellectual (or physical) work lots of people do is that those hours are more-or-less spread across the whole work week, so in your example, kind of 1h30m per day on a 5-day week or closer to 2h/day on a 4-day week.
I would fully agree with the latter part of your comment. Even if you argue that you'd not get more than 3 days of actual work done during a week, it doesn't necessarily follow that your work week should have been 3 days long; more like your daily timetable should probably be shorter and you should not have to wait in your office, mentally tired and not being productive, until the clock says it's 5pm and so you can now go home.
My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.
Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.
the current system is mainly because henry ford decided that it was the most he could make people do line work before productivity decreased and injuries increased. that of course was better working conditions of 10 hour days that the labor unions had negotiated before that. it's not impossible to forsee it going down to 32 hours or working more at home since the nature of work is different.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...
May 1st as an international day for workers demonstrations even came about as a result of the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in 1886 during one of the demonstrations for the 8 hour day. The then AFL proposed May 1st demonstrations as part of relaunching the fight for the 8 hour day.
That some employers saw the writing on the wall and cut it to 8 with less pressure applied than others was in large part because the multiple decades long, sometimes bloody, fight for earlier cuts had shown it did not affect production anywhere near as much as opponents had claimed.
* I can sustain hard mental labor (including but not limited to work) for about 50 hours per week total
* I don't know when I'm going to be in the best state to do that work, and it depends on a lot of factors
* Some of those factors are external, some depend on the project, etc.
* Sometimes, that mental labor needs to go somewhere else, and that subtracts from my overall work budget. That includes things like weird social situations, fixing something around the house, etc.
* I also spend a lot of time passively daydreaming about the last thing I worked on. This is often productive, but also often isn't.
* My productive output also varies a lot on those factors: some weeks, I can produce 60 hours of work, and others only 15-20
I think if you have bursty work patterns like this, it is actually beneficial to have more office days rather than fewer, to "catch" as much productive time and daydreaming time as possible. However, it's an even better argument for remote work, because that minimizes other forms of mental labor, like driving.
The whole idiocy around 5 days a week 9-5 is because people think you have to be in office all that time. People can and do take random half days, hours off to go to the dentist or the doctor or to the post office or whatever the fuck. That's how it has always been. There are very few jobs that require you to literally never fuck off if there's nothing going on. Work adjusts around you if you're a productive person. Some of us can get stuck with shitty bosses and everyone empathizes with that, but for the vast majority of folks, the boss absolutely does not give a flying fuck about when you come in as long as he knows you're disciplined.
After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games.
For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.
Edit: I'd also recommend reading about his health and overwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin
In a modern, fair society, that should translate into both people working 4 hours a day and house chores 4 hours a day.
Unfortunately the reality right now is we're pushing both people to each work 12 hours a day AND do 4 hours of chores on top of that.
I find this sentiment to be pretty rare.
Tomorrow I have meeting starting from 9am. From 9-5 I only have 1.5 hours that are not meetings and they are not concurrent, they are 3 30 minute blocks between meetings. I have an insane deadline I am trying to make in 2 weeks. How am I supposed to get any work done if I am constantly in meetings? I feel like companies should designate at most 2 hours a day as meeting hours, after that let tech workers build tech, its not right to fill days with meetings and then expect us to produce at night.
My last job had almost no meetings it was awesome. I really only worked maybe 20 hours a week but it was solid deep work. Its been a year and the company CTO still reaches out occasionally to see if I want a position for various projects they have coming up.
If you let developers just work when they are in work mode you will get solid results.
She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour.
Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work).
When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”.
An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.
10 years ago a much larger percentage of my day was spent on non-taxing activities that have since been automated.
OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.
Even counting deep concentration periods (flow, whatever you want to call it) this holds true.
The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.
Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people")
The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.
This is similar to my experience.
Back in 2020 I decided to make a career switch from accounting to software engineering. I began studying in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening while working a full-time job. I quickly discovered that I could only study in the morning with a lighter review in the evening.
Eventually, I got to the point where I had to walk away from work and study full-time because it was so mentally exhausting. Around that time, I started learning Greek as well. I attended classes once per week and observed that I had to lighten my CompSci studying workload on days I had Greek class. Otherwise, I would have a high degree of difficulty learning Greek that evening.
I was hitting my mental exhaustion limit after 5 hours of intense, technical learning every day. If I tried to push past that point, I would burn myself out and become noticeably less productive. This was something I had never realized while in school with frequent built in breaks (and perhaps more energy from being younger).
When I was studying for the CPA exam in the library for 8 hours per day, I thought I was being highly efficient the entire time. However, looking back on it, I was spending a good portion of that time taking breaks and doing lighter review of material I already knew, which was not too taxing (pun intended) on my mental energy.
Now, I’m well aware of my upper limits of hard work and find that forcing myself past that point isn’t worth the trade-off of mental exhaustion. I realistically believe that I could switch to a 4 day work week and accomplish the same amount while being more energized in the long-run. I’d love to get the opportunity to test my hypothesis.
As a side note: I found when I was studying full-stack material, switching between backend and front end work when I began to tire of one slowed the rate of my mental exhaustion.
Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanup, or migration config flags over various repos). It wasn’t hard work, but it’s important work that has to get done. Shortening the week doesn’t magically get this done faster.
I guess 4 days work for a librarian doesn't mean anything meaningful and the said librarian productivity doesn't plummet like in a "writing math papers" scenario.
Or for an emergency doctor, a fireman, a shop owner, a sportsman etc. etc.
A friend of mine is an air traffic controller, they work 8 hours straight in 3 8 hours shifts during the 24h they need to cover constantly (meaning they don't even stop for a lunch break, only a few short 10 minutes breaks to stretch or to go to the bathroom) for 5 days straight and then they stay 3 days and 1/2 home, so they work 17-18 days a month.
Anyway 9-5 (which is more like 8-~16 in my Country on average, with an hour long lunch break, so ~36 hours/week in total) was won by workers with actual real social battles and 9-5 is the time of the day where the presence of natural light is more probable.
We could switch to working 23:00-6:00 but I guess it wouldn't be so good for the morale.
Also, I generally really work no more than 1-2 hours per day, the rest is spent thinking about the problem, reading documentation, watching a tutorial, participating in a meeting when I do not have to talk an I can keep the camera turned off and the mic on mute, but mostly is doing something else entirely, completely disconnected from my duties, to enable my brain to absorb the problem and have a fresh view on it sometimes later.
Best ideas happen when you're not actively thinking about them.
https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/...
Economically giving people more time to spend money was a great idea.
If there are people who can't run a mile and those who can run over 100, what makes you think everyone universally can sustain 20-25 hours of focussed work per week?
I've had jobs where I was productive maybe 4 hours a week, and got excellent reviews. So I always wondered if I got that, WTF were the other devs doing?
That is true for deep work like:
- solving mathematical problems
- coding non-trivial stuff
- teaching non-trival stuff
The challange is shallow work e.g.
- replying to emails
- meetings
- scheduling meetings
And than there is no-work:
- checking your phone
- lunch
- walking and chatting before the next meeting
Shallow and no-work can easily eat anywhere between 20 and infinity :)
Besides - doing meetings well is not shallow work at all; scheduling is a pain etc and emails are written better when people aren't tired.
The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.
thanks again
It definitely has some downsides however, I’m the only one in the team that’s off that day, so there’s usually meetings and information that I miss out on, as well as a 20% cut in pay, but I’m very lucky to be in a position where we could afford it, and the time with my son is worth it.
The days at work - those no one will remember.
That’s 60 hrs of work a week, but I get to spend every morning 7am-noon with my kids. It’s been a great change of pace for me personally. We have a garden we do as a family, I can do doc appointments, some field trips, etc. while still working extremely hard. It’s not for everyone, but that schedule has been great for me personally.
It’s okay if it’s a throw away side project but not okay if it’s for your employer? Wat. Seems like a silly distinction and backward if anything.
I definitely don’t work as much as you but I also love my work and work random odd hours and sometimes voluntarily extra. I like it and it’s definitely paid of dividends for my career growth.
Fact is, some people can just work harder than others. This is obvious is it not? It is not because some people are lazy and others aren't. It is not a moral issue. Some people just have higher energy levels in my experience (I'm not one of them, as a type this at 8pm nearly comatose). They just have more capacity. I think it is genetic.
BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours. Sometimes working more many hours is exponentially more productive. Some people want to work many more hours to get more money, maybe because working more doesn’t bother them, maybe because they’d rather have the money, whatever.
I think people want “how many hours should humans work” to have a unified answer, when in reality it ranges from 0 to 100 depending on the person (what they want and what they can do) and situation(e.g some peoples jobs are literally life saving, an extra few hours can be life-or-death).
For example: I believe the most productive time of my life, by far and above, was the time I worked insanely long hours, and in fact those hours were exponential since knowledge work and the fruits of knowledge work often compound.
Now watch how many people tell me my experience is wrong and I’m either lying or delusional, just because they don’t want to believe that sometimes long hours really are more productive.
Blue collar jobs do scale linearly. Many white collar jobs do not, though self-reportedly.
But linear or not in itself is not a problem. If it is linear for a certain job, then there simply must be more people employed. Which is always a good thing, since our system has a baseline unemployment almost by design. People in unemployment but wanting to work are miserable and usually exploited when they do find work. Some businesses won't be able to be profitable without exploiting their workers, but this has historically happened every time workers gained some rights.
That’s the key distinction and as someone who has worked a distinctly bullshit job his entire career; I’m not rushing to spend any more time than I need to sitting at that desk.
I’m a software engineer, and on some of the big projects I’ve been on I have squeezed massive amounts of real productivity out of long long hours. I know managers, bankers, real estate agents, and lawyers who also work long hours and get significantly more done for it. They take an hour less of work per day and start to legitimately fall behind (maybe that’s a good litmus test for how “bullshit” job is? How much time can you take off before it becomes noticeable?). The reality is a spectrum and we shouldn’t bring down some subset in favor of another.
The more and more I see cases like this that exist, the more I feel it's yet more supporting evidence that the US is a failing democracy. We can point fingers and play responsibility games, we can claim its minority protection (are wealthy and powerful individuals really a minority that need more protection in our current structure or should they even be considered a minority), but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to be working in some respects. If we aren't seeing labor law improvements and most fall in labor, something seems amiss.
I'm not advocating for mob rule, there are very good reasons for minority protections, but in some cases when the majority of a democratic society abhors the state of affairs yet we continually have no significant influence to at least try something different, that to me says we're in a failing or failed democracy charading around as a democracy. The older I get, the more I want to call a duck a duck if it walks, quacks, and looks like a duck.
Are they all failing democracies too?
Its a shame how many Americans are too busy hating America to look outside the border and see how good they have it, but also how most of their “uniquely American” problems are not unique at all.
(My perspective is as an Australian living in America. And my comment doesn’t apply to guns.)
Quite simply there are other people. And those people often have other opinions.
It's not happenstance. It's something workers fought and sometimes died to win against an incumbent 6 or 7 day, 10 plus hour a day norm.
It’s lets you have 3 shifts per day (3 x 8 = 24) for full coverage. That also fits with the idea that it gave you a balanced life. 8 hours at work, 8 hours asleep, 8 hours for the rest.
It was a convenient number below the old, much worse, standard.
People act like 40 hours is some kind of natural law that can’t be questioned.
It absolutely can be.
Otherwise can we question the need to differentiate full-time vs part-time? Its certainly arbitrary, and mostly related to whether one qualifies for benefits. In the case of benefits, it may be less than 40 hours.
Dead Comment
Theoretically, that should be a great deal for my employer: the extra rest, and just the way productive work is usually spread out across the week, means that my productivity definitely was not down 20% compared to now, so I was cheaper per hour.
Yet even that culturally seems to be a hard sell in a majority-North American org, let alone keeping pay the same. Shame.
Not only that the productivity didn't decrease, but after a while we were even more productive than before. Meetings were reduced to the minimum and depending on when you started and where you worked, when you finished you had almost a full day available for yourself. These were some of the best 6 months of my employee career.
Every store in the small town was closed, so we decided to head to a restaurant for lunch… and it was packed.
All the shops close up around noon so people can go eat lunch, then go back to work.
That seemed so remarkably human and logical, yet insane as an American. I never wanted to leave.
I don't know if it's true, nobody concerned would ever come to the stupid idea of questioning this nice practice.
Likewise in Sweden, but it's a minority of companies I'd say.
Can you explain what you mean when you say you only work for 4?
In the UK where this trial was run both the employer and the employee pay for National Insurance which covers nationalised healthcare. Whether you work 1 day or 7 a week, you still get covered.
Thinking of healthcare as compensation is what got America into the healthcare mess it's in today.
Though of course, being in the Netherlands, my employer doesn't pay for my health insurance.
Edit: as for the general point about compensation being more than salary, it is also common in the Netherlands that PTO is prorated to the hours you work per week. That is fine; I'm happy to scale everything down to 4/5th if I can scale my working hours down to that.
Deleted Comment
If civilization isn't moving to improve quality of life, but to make sure that we keep working more and more, we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the point of technological progress.
The huge productivity increase in the last 40 years have been entirely siphoned into maximizing profits while working conditions have remained essentially stagnant, so I'd say it's about time to start making some progress on this front.
(food as an example. its the same for clothing to not freeze, shelter to rear offsprings, culture to not kill each other etc)
In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays - https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Idleness-Routledge-Classics-46...
The Conquest of Happiness - https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Happiness-Bertrand-Russell/d...
I am not one of those people. lol
Not that I don't have a constant drive to do something, of course. I just wouldn't engage in surrogate work in order to feel like I'm worth something.
Pretty much as “I love work” as it gets, and I can’t wait for the move to 4 day weeks. Work for works sake gets better when it’s highly focused when you’re in the zone and lets your mind be free for all the rest of the time.