Is 40 hours a week too much?(okta.com) |
Is 40 hours a week too much?(okta.com) |
The reason there's a 40 hour workweek is because socialists, anarchists, and communists fought for one. It was marketed as splitting the day into three even parts, and getting weekends off. There's nothing special about it other than it is a round number, and far more work than is necessary to produce enough to support a family, so it offers ample excess for the owners of capital.
The optimal number of hours is the least necessary to have a comfortable life.
It is extremely interesting to see how people lived in a pre-industrial era. There is a series of videos about long retired german tradesmen, who worked in long dead traditional trades (wheel making, woodcuting and many other very fascinating and obscure ones). I liked it a lot. The consistent theme there is that these people do not have a "work day". There is absolutely no seperation between their private life and what they do for work. Of course they are not doing high intensity work for 16 hours a day, but they are going through a wide varity of different activities, some leisure ones like eating with their families, but a lot of it directly or indirectly related to their work. How much and when they work can be dependent on a varity of factors, but their work is completely integrated into their lives.
One thing I really dislike about a 40h work week as a person living further in the north is that in the winter it is dark when I return. The sun rises at around 7:30, long after I need to wake up.
Also people had tons of holidays during the middle age in Europe.
Crazy working hours peaked during the industrial revolution when workers had life expectations reaching minimums of 20 years.
Not to mention that in many places men were working and women were homemakers some 70 years ago. Now that everybody works we spend our evening and weekends doing chores and housekeeping. (And no, I'm not saying we should go back to 1950!)
Just address the root problem.
The company lost an insane amount of money each quarter (-46% margin).. The are worth almost 8 billion, 1.3 billion in revenue to net -850m in revenue..
If it wasn't for their balance sheet (pretty strong) and gamble short this crap.. I might still, im gonna wait a few months for the woke communists in the org to drain money then short..
I'm almost 100% certain these people are gonna drain the balance sheet whilst their revenue gonna collapse next year.
Yes
Nor are their incentives necessarily aligned properly - if you assume a startup founder is trying to start a business that will make them wealthy, then they may be operating under the assumption that more hours now == fewer later. So a founder may happily push themselves to pull 80 hour weeks thinking that a few years of that pace will pay off so they can coast later.
Most startups fail, and I'd imagine most founders ultimately wind up working for other people. So they'll never get back that additional time + they'll have to keep putting in hours on someone else's behalf.
Exactly. The reason the rank and file don't put that kind of time is they aren't given nearly as generous terms.
This isn't really a discussion of what people can do, people can do much more than they are in general, but instead the problem is how much of the fruits of the effort is willing to be shared.
If I am paid $10/hr for my work I can't eat. My incentives are not aligned. You dont pay me enough to eat.
If I am paid $xxx/hr for my work but I am bound by NDA and non-compete, don't get bonuses in line with product sales (N% of sales go to my check), etc I am not aligned.
The only people "aligned" are the most useless. Sales. Yes, things need to be sold but if the people laboring are not incentivized sales will be useless along with the entire C-suite.
There is no such thing as a "sufficiently incentivized" laborer unless you're paying them a chunk of sales (see: a co-op). Hence why anti-work is such a popular concept even among the highest paid cohorts. Even as developers, we are being robbed blind and are worth far more than they pay. There's a simple test for this: if you work 20 more hours next week will your check potentially go up significantly? If not, your labor is being stolen from you.
[1] If startup founders know their optimal number of hours, why wouldn't regular employees also know this? Why do you think that startup founders have privileged knowledge in this regard?
Plenty of startups go bankrupt and plenty of founders experience burnout, back pain, RSI etc.
Very few people can work 40+ full hours hunched on a keyboard for 3-4 decades.
Another more modern example is the Amish, I don't know if you've had a lot of experience with the Amish but they know how to work, they start before sunup and push through to sundown, taking a short break for lunch and then back at it for hours on end, I definitely wouldn't say they average 20 hours a week over the year.
I just see this claim repeated over and over and it feels like it doesn't make sense and is pushed more because those repeating it like it than any substantial basis in reality.
Historical evidence shows that people worked much less than they did during and after the Industrial Revolution[1].
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
Keynes is right, we should be at around 15 hours per week right now. It's not even a nostradamus prediction, it should have happened. The division of labour, specialization of production and dexterity, and technology has greatly increased productivity.
The answer is globalization, something Keynes didn't think could happen due to diplomacy of his time. So the 'western' world could be at 15 hour weeks but globalization has kept us up high. As these other countries have developed and are starting to industrialize. Pulling people out of poverty and greatly increasing quality of life has been great. It's making us wealthier than ever. We live in a time of abundance.
Shouldn't it be possible to live a life on fewer hours?
If anything, I think companies who have more knowledge and process based workers should look to use the free time for learning/studying. Maybe give funds to take courses whether they're online or offline to help such workers (myself included) improve our skill set. I'm not against more free time off for the same pay but I just think there can be more uses of the time than just being off the clock is what I guess I'm saying.
Startup/founder/significant equity holder? Sorry, no -- at least in the first year or three. Working 50 hours a week vs. 40 can be the difference between success and failure in the first few years of a company. I work anywhere between 40 and 60 hours depending on how critical a looming deadline is. No platitudes about "oh you're more productive < 40" are remotely true. My extra effort has translated directly into dodging many snares that would have screwed us hard. I do however place 60 as my soft limit, beyond that I will pay for it hard after a week or two.
Contrary to the cliches that abound around this topic, I am in good shape, healthy, have a rich-enough social life, and am a great dad.
Working at Joe Widget Co. and get a tight deadline for a new feature? Value of the work was already low, value of your extra effort is pretty much unknowable, why would anyone work overtime?
Early stage startup its much easier to draw a line straight from work -> value.
If someone is used to already working five hours a day and surfing Reddit for another three hours as a "break", then this less than 40 crap sounds like an obvious no-brainer - I can already hear the "but I get my work done in 25 hours for the week!" tripe.
For the rest of us who can work without any distractions for as many hours as necessary, it's silly.
No one is perfectly productive. If you devote 40 hours to something, you're going to spend at least 10-15 hours out of that on non-productive busywork.
There are also some tasks that just require extended periods of focus before something "clicks". No way I could write or code if I was told to pack up and leave after a fixed amount of time.
Also, I've always found that when I'm working hard, I'm more creative in my hobbies as well. I make music as a hobby and whenever I've taken a break from work, the music just doesn't flow.
Caveat: I work for myself so the work is both important and enjoyable to me, and I don't have to deal with office bureaucracies. If I was working for someone else, I might have different views.
http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...
(*) I'm similarly curious about UBI pilots!
If the two were decoupled, employees would more easily be able to adjust their work hours to their personal desires. If you want to work 20 hours per half pay, great. If you want to work 60 hours for 50% more, great.
Individual desires and needs very greatly among people, so such a system would allow a wider variety of people too meet their needs
If these figures are true, it helps me to understand why so many people in the 19th and early 20th century were huge advocates of socialism and communism. Even though, having read about the history of the last 100 or so years, I think that communism is a relatively inefficient and often brutally murderous form of government, even I feel that it might be better to launch a revolution to overthrow the rich and take their stuff than to put up with working so much that there is essentially no time in one's life to do anything other than work, all just to be able to live in some cramped apartment in a dirty industrial city.
Except, Workers would be demanding overtime pay to finish the work they have normally been doing in a 40 hour work week and employers would have to pay premium compensation for the same level of work they used to be getting at 40 hours a week.
If you don't want people to interact in normal ways, why have a business, would business outcomes not be improved by humans interacting and forming social bonds within their workplace, a place that by current standards, we spend 50% of our awake hours?
As opposed to fraternizing at a person's desk, which is not considered work time. Generally speaking. I'm sure there exists companies that encourage fraternization as part of work but they are definitely the minority.
It goes with out saying that there's some flexibility for appointments and personal matters. You don't have work extra hours after going to your doctor for cancer (extreme example there are smaller).
It's not for everyone and it's certainly not the standard. There are also people who work themselves to death and pretend to be fine. I'm sure it _can_ be healthy and fine if that is what you want; it just shouldn't be expected of people.
I feel like that's been the standard in a lot of industries - 9-5 with an hour for lunch - for a long time.
For what I'm actually doing? Yes.
wot?
>HR professionals must carry the torch for this issue.
bruv....
You can see this change with the tenant farmer model. Traditional use of the commons was eliminated by privatization, and farmers then had to rent back smaller plots of land to sustain themselves. Tenant farmers now had rents to pay, so they had to create a surplus of value in order to afford that rent, and could no longer just engage in the subsistence farming they had done in the past, which meant doing more work.
* Meetings
* Mentoring
* Answering random questions
* Continuing education (Hey, Spring 6.0 was just released, what's in that?)
* Support (and being available for support)
I can point to 5h/week that are standing 'meetings' where it is often 'me helping out someone with a git or jira or GitHub issue' and it is that time that is designated each day (to try to avoid having the 'answering random questions' become too disruptive).
I am certainly not '40h/w, butt in seat, head down coding' and even though I may be only "productive" 10-20h/week, I'm certainly busy with work stuff to fill up the rest of my day. It's never "do an hour or two of work in the morning and day dream for the remaining six hours."
Most of us managers would consider meetings, mentoring, work-related Slack conversations to be productive time. Yet I read a lot of the comments here where people don't consider anything to be productive time unless they're actively writing code, which ignores the realities of working in a team environment.
A better metric might be tracking the amount of non-work time: Time spent on HN, social media, reading news articles, running errands. Again, us managers are realistic that everyone can (and should!) take small breaks throughout the day. However, if those breaks expand to fill 20-30 hours of the supposed 40-hour workweek, something has gone very wrong. That's certainly not normal at any well managed company.
When I say I’ve only been productive for 20 hours in a week, I don’t mean I spent 20 hours programming and 20 hours in meetings, I mean I spent 10 hours programming and 10 hours in meetings. I’d be surprised if most people only count programming time as productive time! If you’re doing 40 hours a week of programming + meetings + support + any other needle-moving things, you’re more productive than I’ve ever been in a job.
That said, I feel you could cut my time on the clock from 40 hours a week to 32 with minimal-to-no impact on my total productivity.
Is it lines of code or reasoning about lines which lines of code to write/adjust and everything else is not?
My definition would encompass all of the stuff you mentioned as ancillary. In some cases, it's even more Productive than the actual code writing.
1. Non work social media. 2. Work socializing (water cooler). 3. External support/collaboration/reviews. 4. Day dreaming not about work. 5. Thinking about work while not “producing” maybe not even at computer.
I can work 40 hours where it feels like 10-20 hours are actually working on my “planned” work, but the other time is on #3 and #5 which “feels” like a void but is actually critical and valuable to business.
I’m not saying you are but some people categorize this sort of work as BS or not work and that’s totally wrong IMO.
I disagree. But I think what we qualify as "work" is more rigid than it needs to be. Is spending 5 minutes looking at HN every few hours work? Most people would say no, but it absolutely helps developers to know what's going on or new or what other devs outside their company are saying.
If I spend 20 minutes reading about a language/app that my company doesn't use is that work? I think a lot of the "yes" answers would be accompanied by rolling eyes.
I doubt we've found the optimal work to rest ratio, but a lot of these assumptions go unchallenged in these discussions.
I think it's unfair to not count any of this as work. As engineers it's important for us to be on top of current trends and available tools.
Yes, your company might not use it today, but if no one reads about new developments in tooling/languages, your companies processes will always stay the same and (if better tools for the job emerge), will just be priming a market that new entrants using better technology will be better able to serve.
Some exploration of new technologies is really important for people in our field, and it's really unfortunate that (many) people working in the field feel they have to spend ~10-20 hours per week of their own time keeping abreast of new developments to stay competitive
You'll be passed over for promotions because you're so good in your current position!
You'll be praised and then one day you'll get a new boss when your old boss moves on. And your new boss will have this need to prove themselves to their boss. And they'll do this by turning your 40 hour week into a 60 hour week. Why? Because you're a tool!
Don't be a tool. Do what your boss does - spend time talking to people around the company - thats what lunch meetings are all about - figure out how to get those expensed! Get to know everyone and follow up with them frequently. Invite them to non-work things. Go home early because you have a life.
Unless, of course, your work is your life. In which case, you're leaving the dream, bud!
There shouldn't be a 20-30 hour "void" in people's work week.
If people are meeting, discussing work, building relationships within the company, or otherwise doing things around their work, I still consider that to be productive time. Nobody actually expects programmers to be writing code 40 hours a week. We know this.
On the other hand, if people are spending 30 hours per week messing around on the internet, browsing social media, chatting in social Discords, or other activities that are clearly not work related, that's not normal at all at well managed companies.
There are a lot of companies where people can get away with working 2 hours per day and then ignoring work for the other 6 hours of their supposed 40-hour work week, of course. I think a lot of people have experienced these companies somewhere in their career and concluded that everyone, everywhere is actually only expected to do 2 hours of work-related things per day. It's not true at all, and I've met a lot of people who really struggle to adapt once they finally end up on a well-managed team that expects people to put in more than a couple hours of work-related effort per day.
I suspect we'll see a lot of companies clamping down on these low-productivity pockets now that the easy money has run out and we're all forced to examine personnel costs very closely. I know I've had a few coworkers who curiously never seem to do much of anything. They've always been first to go when the layoffs arrive and their managers are forced to choose who stays and who goes.
I'm a consultant with a 70% utilisation goal, meaning that at least 28 hours per week needs to be spent on things which I can defend billing a customer for. Add non-billable pre-sales activity and admin task on top, and not much time is left over.
My own experience and what I've observed in other people is that this is unsustainable both because of normal working habits and the unreliable cadence of new projects. As a result, I spend a few months of the year working 60 hours per week to get ~100% utilisation, then the next few months getting as much project time as possible while also catching up on all the other obligations I was forced to neglect like training.
As I write this, consulting seems more and more like a really shitty style of working...
It all just depends on how much ambition you have my friend, you too can slack off for 3/4 of your workday if you don't take on more responsibility than you can do in 1/4 of your time lolololol
I’ve worked on plenty of teams where nebulous “team building” was an entirely enjoyable and majority unnecessary excess way to spend time at work. Loved those teams, but we could have worked a 4 day week, still had a tight team, and gotten just as much done for the business.
I've heard that at Amazon, these people are referred to as "PIP fodder", which makes it sound like they're still able to contribute the fulfillment of business objectives, in their own way
The thing is that many modern jobs don't fit a taylorist model where you can measure worker performance precisely.
Not to mention that many variables that affect worker performance are out of control of companies.
That's assuming that the work you've been set to do is productive, and you're doing it in a productive manner. For instance, I've spent weeks grinding away on features that never get used by customers. Is that productive? I've also spent hours trying to fix a bug because of infrastructure/platform/tooling constraints that means the code/compile/debug cycle is stupidly slow. Is that productive?
I don't have the slightest doubt I could be a lot more productive than I am now while working less hours. But it's often down to factors that are more or less out of my control.
"No better options" is a hell of a drug, haha.
That said, we should definitely be experimenting. If people are equally productive at 40 hours and 20 hours, we shouldn’t keep them in the office just for aesthetics.
Unless you are a cashier or some other customer service position, the time you spend working should be matter very little compared to your output.
If you a job that takes you 20 hours, you can either do it in 20 hours and get a huge chunk of your life back, or you can do it in 40 hours and spend a lot of time chatting with your coworkers making them unproductive.
It's up to management to understand how much time it takes to complete tasks and to staff accordingly.
Conversely, many gigs I've had there was multiple hours per day of mindless web surfing because there just wasn't work to do.
Such irrationalities have always been present in the institution of wage slavery.
See twitter for an excellent current example of what this looks like.
Sometimes I'll wander round the house and read docs or make notes on my tablet while doing housework, still contributing to future work/planning but definitely would show as 'inactive'.
If people worked 20 hours per week, the actual productive time would likely be between 5 and 10 hours per week.
We shouldn't treat productivity like we're robots, we're not switched on working on a repetitive task for all of 8 hours a day.
This is the 10x engineer. Their peers are working 10 hours, but never get in the flow like they do. Hence the 10x productivity.
I haven't seen anyone doing 40 hours a week. At least not more than a week.
It's not exactly hard at his level. He can delegate absolutely everything and cannot be obliged to do anything. He can pick who is around him at all times, and they are usually obligated to cater to his wishes. 120 hours of casual chats, meetings, presentations, shared meals, and travel count as long as it's related to any of his 3 major businesses.
40 is nothing...
are you joking? 2 hours a day is nothing.
> actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
i've easily topped 100 hours a week for prolonged periods. i'd guess it is the same for any founder.
Some people spend most of their life working 60 real hours weeks, especially blue collar work.
I have a white collar workplace, and there is a big spread. There are people that do 20 hours of real work and those with a 60+ hour average.
I have done 100+ hour weeks of real heads down work & all nighters , but can't/wont do it prolonged.
As skeptical as some people are of merit based compensation, I'm confident that the willingness to pull out the stops and get it done has lead to promotions, raises, and freedom to scale down my workload during slow times.
I think it is interesting that some people simply don't believe that high volume work happens, is productive, or is even possible.
Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.
Usually in the form of conflating diminishing returns with less absolute productivity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-sta...
some days it seems like my job at tech co is to authenticate.
I look back and see so much wasted time, and saw so many colleagues who seemed drained and generally rushed to fit in 'life' things around work. Family, friends, hobbies, medical appointments, enjoying nature [...]. It should be the opposite of this. Work should come second to life, especially if we have the luxury of making it so. Otherwise, what are we all doing??
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/the...
If I dont have any meetings past my 6th hour of being in work-mode (including lunch time), I'm not going to produce anything that won't anger me future-self. The 5DWWBO6HPD also helps you to be actually productive after the 6th hour when the need arises every once in a while and you have to be on "Elon is breathing down my neck"-mode.
Many remote salary workers regularly work 6 hour days. Getting more recognition for this seems like a good first step in getting acceptance for 4 days, 8 hours.
Societies (and smaller groups like companies too) could get stuck in a shitty "equilibria" - where even a non-expert can spot the inefficiencies, suggest obvious improvements, and yet not have the change occur. A great analysis of the unfortunate gridlock we find ourselves in sometimes.
I know it is different if you are managing a job, but as an average worker it was not too bad.
Mentally tired, for me, is much harder to recover from than physically tired. I'm not saying I want to work 70 or 80 hours a week lifting heavy things, but this type of hourly rating system can be very subjective by the individual.
If office workers had the ability to have more relaxed PTO I think it would alleviate a lot of that. But even in places where that's possible via the type of work, it's still culturally not acceptable to just take a day off here or there without a "reason."
It feels as though the modern 9-5 lifestyle is a lie that no one questions. I just can't get behind it as long as I feel like our society doesn't actually require that much constant effort to maintain or even to keep pointed in the right direction.
Only a human can be tricked into thinking like that"
Volker Pispers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysGB9yXE_g)
IMO the bigger problem is consumerism and the ephemeral nature of many goods (they break easily). This keeps us on the hamster wheel forever.
If it wasn't for that, my current salary can cover _everything_ in my rented flat for one year of work, maximum two. Add 5-10 more for a good flat or a house.
It seems the system doesn't want people to retire at 30. So we're kept busy and all our stuff breaks constantly.
It sucks and it gave me a serious existential dread but I see no way out. Working hard to maybe have a side gig with a passive income is the best I can do right now.
So again, I believe a lot of people understand what you're saying but what can they do?
Considering travel, it bumps up to 50 hrs/week.
I hate how this 10-hour "work tax" is always dismissed as part of 40 hour work week.
If I say "need" people will tell me it's my fault and to change jobs.
If I say "want" people will tell me it's my fault and to change jobs.
Luckily it's a tech job pays well, so I saved up enough so that I can quit. I'm doing that in a couple months, and after I'll just enjoy life and support myself with freelance work that I enjoy a lot more. F** the system, I couldn't care less about the success of any company or the products they produce.
40 hour workweek is fine for most people, but I think HR ought to be more flexible in working hours and salary employees choose, based on their season of life. Because we are dual-income with 3 young children, I work 32 hrs instead of 40; but it's an odd arrangement I had to ask for. I see families in a simliar situation struggling, and I think it ought to be more of the norm to offer this without a company raising questions about productivity/loyalty/laziness/benefits etc.
Most of the work I do happens passively as I think about some problem. Much of this thinking occurs outside of the traditional 9-5 window.
"Amount of time spent presiding over a work PC" doesn't count as a useful metric in my book. I prefer to measure the quality of work via outcomes and customer feedback. Meetings are an unhappy exception to all of this, but they are a necessary evil. Eliminate unnecessary meetings with prejudice - They will come back like zombies if they were really that important to the business.
Contributions still need to be mapped to outcomes, but that has nothing inherently to do with a time dimension. Non-contributors and relative performance should still be quite obvious to management, even if you can't say exactly how much time was spent by each participant.
I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result.
It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I want to get things done.
I tend to sit down and think before I write even a single line of code. In the office, I used to stare at my screen with headphones on to "look like I was working". Now that I work from home, I usually spend that time walking around the house, doing mindless chores, and sometimes lying down on my bed in the dark.
I would say that the time spent lying in my bed is my most productive time. Someone else might say I steal billable hours.
I have to say, only 3 days "at work" in a week felt just a bit too few, and I was often rushing to get everything done that had to get done that week.
On the other hand, on US holiday weeks with Monday offs, are fantastic feelings work-wise. I feel like I get basically the same amount done in the week, and the weekend is considerably more relaxing- still tired Friday night, but Sunday afternoon and night isn't a mad dash of "finish all chores that need to be done before the weekend wraps up"
Things would be different if my job was something more service-focused, like a doctor or dentist or hair stylist, where by definition they're going to be at 20% less productive if they're only seeing clients/patients/etc for 4 days a week instead of 5, so I'm not quite sure how as a society we balance that out, but I really wish 4 day weeks were much more the norm, and if I ever run my own company, that's what we're going to aim for.
The work is simply the contractual agreement between you and your employer. He or it has a notion about how long it's supposed to take, and you do too. And so on your end, you have to be willing to give up a certain amount of freedom in order to stay productive enough for the workplace to want to award you for the time spent in their service, whether that time is productive or not.
On their end, they of course want you to be as productive as possible, but they also know that it's not possible 100% of the time. And so that is the basis for the contract.
Then there are ways around it. Say you can make a hack that'll make you able to complete the job in half that time, or less. Lots of people get paid obscene amounts of money for very little "work" but the value of that work is simply that high, and so that's what they're paid for it.
So instead in thinking in terms of hours or work, I tend to want to think in terms of how much time I need to provide value. And the less time that is, the better - for both parties. They get better value for money, and I get more time to dream up better ways of creating value.
Our entire industrial mental model of work comes from at least two hundred years ago.
Yes, you get diminishing returns on work if you're working a lot of hours, but you can still get more done per day even if it's not as efficient. Also, constant immersion in a domain causes acceleration/synergies that you don't get with a more "healthy" work-life balance. That being said I think chasing this is never worth it unless you're getting the same share of the loot as everyone else. (Or if you're the one who's disproportionately set up to benefit from the group's success, but I generally consider that to be immoral)
Things have gotten so good, that almost everyone has riches beyond the wildest dreams of someone from 1850, it's just that we all have it, so it doesn't feel like we've gotten much more from our productivity.
In 1966 the federal minimum wage was amended to include most workers, so a comparison at that point can be made.
In 1967 the minimum wage was $1.40, or $10.92 adjusted for inflation. The current minimum wage is $7.25, so in dollar terms the cost of goods, especially housing, really is much higher in minimum wage terms.
For example, some different type of roads have different upper speed LIMIT. They also have a minimum required speed. Nobody is forced to drive at the upper limit constantly.
Today is not a good day, I'm having hard time putting my thoughts into words.
Moreover, I think it would be good to shift from hourly salary to daily salary. Whether you work 1h or 50hr in a particular day, it shouldn't matter, you should be paid for the day. We never say my hourly living cost when we talk about living expense, instead we say daily living cost. Which is a better metric in my opinion. One day of work should at least guarentee one day of living cost. This should be a LAW, that every employment (indipendently of hours) should guarentee per LAW the living expenses for a day. It might be hard for some kind of jobs, I understand. But I think we can do better than getting paid hourly.
I live with my parents, so I can save some money. Honeslty, I just need $30 to eat 2 healthy meals and $15 for rent a day. How much hours is that for a Software Engineer, 1-2hrs of work with a lot of extra money. Why should I slave away the rest 6-7hrs? This also helps with my creativity, because I cannot pre-allocate and command my brain to be creative for the allotted time, excatly from 9am to 5pm.
1. 5-hour work day, not pretending busy work for 8 or even 12 full hours (eg, 996 in China tech corps)
Knowledge work, especially creative work, is just different from hard manual labor. More work hours won’t necessarily produce more value
For some people / jobs, maybe 2-hour work day is enough.
@tobi says it well [1]: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
2. One or multiple part-time jobs
For some part-time jobs, you work for money; for others, you work for fun/impact.
See how @gumroad works [2]: No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
3. Streaming income in real time, rather than bulk income once or twice per month
You have a stream of small incomes 24/7. Some are passive incomes, while others are active incomes. You get paid directly from customers you serve, not from a proxy (eg HR in big corp). Anytime during the day, you know how much you’ve made so far
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[0] https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409
I’m currently at a top-tier tech company which pays very well but wastes an incredible amount of my time on unnecessary overhead. It would be amazing to get my work done in four hours a day and spend the rest of my time on fulfilling projects and relationships.
1) The time you work is spent doing meaningful things.
2) The amount of hours equals the point where if you'd add hours, the negatives outweigh the positives.
In that sense it's bizarre how both parameters don't seem much of a priority. Entire armies of office workers are stuck in zoom meetings and email, seeing most of their day cut up into tiny slices where you can't do focused work. It's quite common to hear that people do about 2 hours of actual work per day.
Rather than obsessing over some ancient number of hours "present", shouldn't effectiveness be an absolute top priority? Not only do managers not seem to care that their employees do little real work, they actually believe that those small blanks in your calendar means you're not busy enough. Have some more meetings. Let's collaborate more!
Here's my "CEO for a day" solution:
A system will for each meeting calculate its cost, which would be the amount of participants multiplied by their hourly rate. Since a 1 hour meeting really costs about 2 hours of productivity (just before and after meetings, nobody does work), the sum would be multiplied by 2, or 1.5 at least.
Once per month or so, you check the aggregates, starting with the worst offenders. It looks like Tom organized about 30K worth of meetings last month. Now Tom is going to tell the company what tangible value he produced in these meetings to offset this.
You'll soon find that it's all power laws. A small group of people responsible for flooding people with meetings.
And you can do the same with email. Efficient workers sent perhaps a handful of emails per day, yet Tom seems to be sending 50-100, all day and night.
Perhaps Tom should shut the fuck up and not mistake his joy in communicating with people for work.
I haven't personally noticed being at the computer for 2hrs less a day causing me to be less productive.
What noticably makes me more productive:
- Not feeling exhausted, depressed, shitty, or feeling like I never have time for anything
- Working bum on seat until I feel like I'm not productive, then taking a break (go for a walk, empty the dishwasher) and let my brain solve the problem for me.
- If I really want to get more done and focus, and I have a clear goal, rounds of pomodoros
[1] get enough sleep; exercise each day; cook healthy meals; spend time with my partner; have time to myself; have time to perform daily chores and errands, etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
You never really want "100% utilization" (something I feel a lot of managers don't quite understand).
The answers here are very interesting. I work more than 40 hrs (my own business stuff) and I always wish there was more time in the day, lol. Never worked at a big company but I do imagine if people are only "working" 20 hrs that's a sign that they could "work-less." IMO as long as stuff gets done (in a timely manner) that's all that should matter.
The only completely unproductive state is if you're doing nothing for your job and also refuse to respond to communications.
Maybe we should work pilots like that... It'd certainly make flying more "fun"
"you SSO into b2b saas and send a few kb's around every day"
"oh my god"
Wonder if the two things could be related.
6HWD vs 4DWW - FIGHT ;)
We seem to continue to hustle to survive but the notion of survival is ingrown and only really has meaning within the context of humanity. The broader notion of survival, against the elements, seems like a solved problem.
not really. It's easy to survive against the elements, but that's because those who perform the tasks of helping you survive against the elements (and food and necessities) are expecting you to contribute higher-order goods/services back.
> thrive quite effectively with far less effort directed in the right way.
so who's doing the directing? if it's a central authority, we know how that went.
The only real option left is market directed. Which is what we have today. There cannot be, at the current technological level, an easy life. Until the day humanity move to post-scarcity, this will remain the case.
If I had this confidence, I'd put in the hours cheerfully; I've had spells of 80-100 hour weeks in the past and invariably it was caused by sales people or managers over-promising without asking a technical expert, and could have easily been avoided. Doing the hours resulted in some vague gratitude at best.
Now (in a new role), I can see clear evidence of things which are correlated with promotion, but working long hours is not one of them.
Of course working 60 hours a week on some bullshit project with no impact will not have the same results.
I know one UK dev who took a job in one of those, moved there from some hotel booking company, earned $200k, lasted almost 2 years and then got unceremoniously sacked right when one of his close family members passed away due to missing required metrics.
So while it may be important, it's just wasted time for many.
Says more about the organisation than the definitions, but still.
In fact, even just for specifically code-related work, think about code review. Really closely reviewing a big PR can take hours.
Here's a fun thought experiment. How many engineers in a team do you need before one of them could be employed full-time just reviewing others' code?
I don't know the answer, but it could be as few as 10 other team members, depending on the size and complexity of the PRs.
And reviewing code is extraordinarily productive - looking for correctness, code style and patterns, tool selection and usage, app structure, etc., etc. One of the best ways to mentor team members and help keep the codebase clean.
Personally, I think the non-value add category doesn't translate from a factory to coding. If your job is putting boxes on a pallet, when you're browsing HN instead you probably don't do it faster later. When coding, at least for me, I take breaks to think or clear my mind, and I'm not swapping productive coding for online time wasting, browsing HN (or taking a walk or coffee) is a necessary part of the work that improves productivity.
All that to say, meetings and other management stuff can and should be streamlined as much as possible, small breaks, not necessarily. If someone is actually typing code (or an equivalent activity) 25% of their time sitting at the computer, I'd consider that e extremely productive.
1. An hour-long meeting where architecture is decided
2. Doing investigation/documentation of RCA for an incident
3. Spec reviews with stakeholders who will have to use the product
But yes managers dont get this when i say i get all my work done during lunch hour.
The least efficient/productive company I have ever worked for had formal meetings all the time. What takes a week where I work now would take 6 months there.
So no I don’t agree that meetings are automatically productive/useful in general. I am pretty sure you can measure how productive a software company is by the following formula:
Time spent working on projects divided by Time spent in meetings.
A huge chunk of lower income is dedicated to housing, to an extent that many cannot actually afford housing at all.
The gains of our productivity have been distributed in a most unequal manner.
When I lived below poverty line I still had internet, a computer, an apt, access to high quality food and medicine (by 1850 standards), plenty of friends, and a television. I just had to live with 3 other people.
But it’s tough. As a product manager, I think that the right spec can greatly increase engineering efficiency. If that’s true, and bear with me, spending an extra 20 hours on a spec might save 1000 hours of dev time. Isn’t that the same as making those devs more productive? So do we count that work as 20 hours, or 1000 hours?
I like it in principle but I’m not sure it scales across disciplines.