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You really don’t need to work so much
- bkjelden 11y agoOne thing I haven't seen much of in the Amazon discussion of the last week is the fact that there is little evidence showing chronically overworked employees are more productive than well-balanced ones. Why has every article in the last week assumed that the Amazonians working 80 hr weeks are getting twice the work done? Has every journalist and blogger in the country collectively forgotten the concept of diminishing returns on hours worked?
- strathmeyer 11y agoIf they worked their employees less, the jobs would be more desirable, and they'd have to pay them more.
- janesvilleseo 11y agoI simply think it's all about cost cutting. Salaried workers do not get over time. On paper it doesn't cost the company anything. Why pay for 2 workers when you can make 1 work twice as much.
- scintill76 11y ago> Why pay for 2 workers when you can make 1 work twice as much. Even if the quality drops off so that it's only as good as say, 1.5 well-rested workers, they still got an extra 0.5 for free.
- DanBC 11y agoUnless employee churn goes up, and they have to pay for recruitment and training.
- scintill76 11y agoSure. I wasn't necessarily agreeing, just saying that may be their reasoning even if they are fully aware productivity drops. The original comment also said it doesn't cost anything "on paper." Could this be a way of passing the cost to another department? Maybe a department manager is a slavedriver and knows it's not efficient long term, but he doesn't care as long as the costs (like replacement recruiting) don't come out of his budget. I don't know if that's how budgets really work though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 11y agoFrom the things I've seen, an 80-hour employee is worth 0.8 a 40-hour employee.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoHere's the thing, it's unmeasurable. Most of software is invisible, and would take a tremendous amount of effort to analyze well (for quality, value, etc.), only a fraction of which is ever expended in the moment (if at all). The reality is that good people work under poor conditions and do poorly, other people get burnt out, other people with talent "evaporate" out of the team/org/company because they are fed up or what-have-you. All of this degrades the ability of the team/company to execute on difficult projects well, but that is incredibly hard to measure objectively. Especially since every iteration and every project tends to have its own unique qualities which make direct comparisons to previous projects non-trivial. That leaves only subjective judgments. People may look around and ask "why can't we execute as well as we used to?" but unless it's a drastic difference it may not be very noticeable, if at all. And that's the thing, objective measures are nearly impossible to come by, and a lot of the data for subjective measures is not well known beyond only a handful of people. Software is fundamentally a creative endeavor, and this shows the most during the development process. Judging the quality of a company overall from year to year then becomes similar to judging the quality of, say, a band or an actor or a comedian. Debating which, say, Smashing Pumpkins album was the best is fundamentally similar to judging whether the developing capability at, say, google (or microsoft or facebook or amazon) was better in 2012 or 2010 or what-have-you. And this is even difficult to judge over long periods (say, time slices of an entire decade) when looking back years after the fact. It's essentially impossible in the moment, especially in micro-cosm. All of which is to say, there's no sure, objective way to tell whether you're getting 1.5x well-rested workers worth of work, 2x, 10x, 0.5x, 0x, -1x, or -5x. All you know for sure is that they're putting in more hours or "crushing" more bugs, so you focus on the metrics you do have even if they are bad metrics and could lead you to make all of the wrong choices.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThey aren't. In fact, there's a lot of research showing otherwise, going back decades, at least since the '80s/'90s or so.
- severus_bro 11y agoThey don't have chronically overworked employees. They simply burn them out and then replace them with newer/younger workers. I think the NYT reported that the average tenure of an Amazon worker is 1 year. Just let that sink in for a minute.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoOh, I know, I was there (for 1 year, ironically). I was talking more generally. Amazon is at the higher end of unsustainable, like most of the gamedev industry (for example), but on the company scale there's always more workers feeding into the top of the funnel, so they can still get the work done, they don't care that they're churning through employees. Nevertheless, fundamentally most tech companies work on a similar model, they're just not as horrid as Amazon so the process isn't as obviously absurd. But it's still a broken system that I don't think anyone really knows how to fix, yet.
- severus_bro 11y agoI don't think Amazon and the other corporations perceive this as a broken system. It looks like they want/designed it like this.
- deciplex 11y agoSince you were there: What effect does that churn have on their technology? If the average developer only sticks around for one or two years before burning out, subject-matter experts are going to be really scarce, and once you don't have any of those you lose the ability to innovate in any meaningful sense.
- mmagin 11y ago"They may be the byproduct of systems and institutions that have taken on lives of their own and serve no one’s interests. That can happen if some industries have simply become giant make-work projects that trap everyone within them."
- rdlecler1 11y agoIf we were more efficient we'd full that extra time with more work. And if we didn't, someone else would. Ultimately that's sort of the problem. We need to work really hard and long to pay off student loans, buy a house, pay for good schools. If we don't we don't get those things. It's an arms race where there are fewer high paying jobs than there are people to fill them generations ahead limit upward mobility.
- Animats 11y agoMuch of this is the overhead of competition. Consider athletics. The amount of training and effort required increases steeply as you approach world-class performance levels. Yet those levels are maybe 20% beyond reasonable performance levels. A good high school mile run is 5 minutes; 4 minutes is world class, and the world record is 3:43:13. The level of effort to get the last 20% is huge. Manufacturing isn't like that at all. In manufacturing, if you double your inputs, you get at least twice as much stuff out, and through economies of scale, may get more. This works so well that manufacturing employment is only 7% of the US workforce, yet the US produces more stuff than ever. (Yes, even with importing a lot of stuff.) This also applies to construction, mining, and agriculture - all the real stuff. Finance, however, isn't like that at all, because it's mostly zero-sum. Winning matters. Avoiding losing matters more. In subsystems where winning matters, there is an incentive to put excessive resources in to avoid losing. This is also true of advertising, startups in crowded fields, and businesses with high brand recognition. The reason people in the US are working so hard is that there's no effective pushback against this in the zero-sum sectors.
- steilpass 11y agoHow could an effective pushback look like?
- Animats 11y agoRemoving most of the exemptions to the overtime requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act would be a good start.[1] Bigger penalties for non-compliance, like triple damages, would help, too. [1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs23.pdf http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs23.pdf
- hwstar 11y agoExactly. Adopting a world wide standard based on the European Working Time Directive would be a step in the right direction. They need to negotiate things like this in trade agreements. Labor standards need to be the similar worldwide and not be a race to the bottom.
- marak830 11y agoI think the article is missing a certain point. I work 40 hours a week as an english teacher, my wife works full time. Thats the only way we can save money, im soending over 80% of my free time coding to try and get sales so we can buy a house . I dont know if im missing the point of the article, i may be.
- sokoloff 11y ago> Thats the only way we can save money Please take this in the constructive manner in which it is intended: Do you drive 2 cars newer than 2009? Paying a loan payment on both (or worse, leasing)? Do you eat out at restaurants more than once a month [for very special occasions]? Do you regularly buy Starbucks or the equivalent? Do you pay $100 to your cable company and $120 to your cell phone company every month? If you're anything like the average American, you are leaking a large amount of consumption that's on autopilot. Expensive, nearly new cars, in multiples, upgraded frequently, each with a loan or lease payment and expensive collision insurance required by the bank, paying an army of servants to cater to your food needs, buying $5 cups of hot water poured over roasted beans, etc. "But, but, I need all of those things to get to our jobs reliably, to de-stress after so much work, etc!" No, no, you don't, but American marketers have convinced you that you do, and you see it reinforced by most of your peers, so you do. For those who want to learn more, start with: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-like-car-habit/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-... and http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... and then randomly click around his blog) Even if you don't want to buy a bike to commute with immediately, you can make small changes, like keeping your sensible, reliable car for 12 years instead of 4, cutting out $5 coffee runs entirely, switching to a $50/mo plan for 2 cell phones, cook at home more, etc. (I have no connection to MMM and I don't follow all of his guidance, but I find his perspective to be amazingly helpful in challenging auto-pilot consumption. I use Ting [Sprint reseller] as my cell phone plan; wife and I pay $45-55/mo for 3 phones, two iPhones and a Nexus. www.ting.com is the non-referral link, [ https://z9prmb2f3t5.ting.com/ https://z9prmb2f3t5.ting.com/ is my referral link, but I care more about you saving money than getting a referral credit, so I listed the other first ])
- hliyan 11y agoOnce upon a time, it was taken for granted that the wealthier classes enjoyed a life of leisure on the backs of the proletariat. Today it is people in skilled trades who can most find reasonable hours coupled with good pay; the American professional is among those subject to humiliation and driven like a beast of burden. This is very reminiscent of Orwell's 1984, where the "proles" [1], while suffering under poor living conditions, had more freedom than party members, who were constantly under watch and had their behaviors strictly controlled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proles
- InclinedPlane 11y agoOne thing that is difficult to appreciate and hasn't been studied much is the drastic differences between what constitute a "high workload" for manual labor and for cognitive labor. All of our labor laws and all of our cultural intuition has been calibrated to manual labor, which leads to incorrect conclusions when we try to apply those same norms and boundaries to cognitive labor. You can work less than 40 hours a week and still be overburdened when it comes to cognitive labor due to the high amount of stress and the difference in workload capacity. From my experience and observation I'd say that getting even 4 hours a day for 5 days a week of cognitive labor is near the high end of the normal range of what might be long-term sustainable. Also, I suspect that people in the tech industry switch jobs and switch companies on a comparatively short time scale partly because doing so helps reset the cognitive load burden to some degree. Partly because often it involves taking a bit of time off in between jobs, partly because it involves being granted a "grace period" where taking extra time to get stuff done and being allowed to make mistakes is allowed. It makes me wonder what a truly "sustainable" environment for software development or other cognitive work would look like. And how different it would be from the norms we accept for such work today.
- lordnacho 11y agoOverwork is directly related to the impossibility of measuring performance, and the cargo cultish attempt to increase output. Say you're doing some white-collar job, like managing a set of accounts for a large corporation. In all likelihood, you didn't build that business. You inherited it from some other guy. You can't say to your boss you're responsible for 100M in sales, because a good chunk of that would have been there regardless. There's also the noise: other firms are doing things too, there's an economy that goes up and down, customer orders may be lumpy. So how much did you make? Hard to say. What you can do is to look like you really care.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoI agree, performance-led cultures can lead to overwork, but non-performance-led cultures can do the same. Let's just say I've worked in companies where the level of bureaucracy and inefficiency has been sizeable... copious amounts of meetings, work that could easily been handled automatically been done manually, etc... I didn't say anything because I didn't want anyone to lose their job, the company was still stable enough to support the people they employed, and whilst I don't regret that decision, there's no doubt it added to people being overworked.
- lordnacho 11y agoThis is true as well. In something like a government bureaucracy things need to be done in a specific way so that nobody thinks anyone is being favoured, there's no perception of corruption, and everyone who encounters the system gets an equal treatment. In practice it means a lot of procedures that don't seem to make any sense and a lot of work complying with those procedures. Quite stressful for the people doing it actually.
- fallingfrog 11y agoWhere's the second half of the essay? He just drops off in mid thought without making any suggestions or deeper analysis. Just lazy.
- asr0 11y agoThe title is misleading. You really DO need to work so much and probably even more. Two observations: 1.The competition about less and less jobs gets stronger 2.The people don't believe in unions anymore, which is the only way to negotiate for better working conditions and less hours. So this is a I versus You race to the bottom. This is going to be fun. :-)
- Thriptic 11y agoIs it possible that some of this overwork is being driven by general existential malaise? Having a lot of free time without purpose (and especially without meaningful relationships to occupy it) is actually pretty boring and depressing after a few days. I've found myself working many more hours / weekends during points of my life when I didn't have many friends around just so I didn't have to sit at my apartment by myself and feel bored or feel like drinking. The work wasn't incredibly productive, but at least it was interesting and filled me with some sense of meaning.
- ianlevesque 11y agoThat's definitely a real phenomenon, but more sustainably less work time / more free time is more time to develop meaningful relationships & hobbies, in turn reducing existential malaise. All of that is much easier said than done of course.
- ef4 11y ago> If we assume that there is, to a certain degree, a fixed amount of work necessary for society to function... That is a terrible assumption. The scope of work that is both physically possible and economically feasible is constantly shifting. To believe that we're "out of work to do" you have to believe every human need is already being met.