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What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements

What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic. Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.

WalterSear 11y ago
I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. There may be very good reasons for the disparity in pay.
- tehwalrus 11y ago
  There is; a negative correlation. Humans are much, much less efficient when tired/overworked.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    Don't be facetious: that's not at all what we are talking about here.
    - SamBam 11y ago
      It's not remotely facetious. Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.
      - WalterSear 11y ago
        >Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. Now you've erected a strawmen: no one said anything about doubling your hours. Good luck with your agenda and prejudice.
        Vraxx 11y ago
        I think the point he was trying to make still holds without such absurd multipliers as "doubling", it's just an intuitively easy to grasp multiplier. What he's saying is that increasing your number of hours may get more absolute work done, but proportionally a person accomplishes less as more hours are worked. Thus, the correlation between time in office (hours) and productivity (work accomplished per unit time) is a negative correlation.
        WalterSear 11y ago
        You are implying that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. This is, in the frame of this discussion, in itself implicitly sexist. Women aren't asking for flex time in order to relax: they want flex time in order to do work that isn't business related, like taking care of their family. So the same number of hours are being worked - the question is whether using these extra hours to do company business is more beneficial to the company than doing something else. Quite frankly, it's kind of a ridiculous discussion. I can't see how it isn't driven by implicit benevolent sexist assumptions. https://www.google.com/search?q=benevolent+sexism https://www.google.com/search?q=benevolent+sexism
        Vraxx 11y ago
        Woah woah woah, slow down. You are infering that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. I was not saying anything at all about time spent outside the job. I was trying to clarify the argument that you were responding to by demonstrating how it is not a straw man. To follow the argument from it's origins, you led with >I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. And you were later responding to SamBam saying >Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. Which I was clarifying was not exactly a straw man because the fact that he chose "double" the hours was merely a hyperbole to demonstrate that productivity (in the office) does not scale positively with time spent (in the office). So we are talking about correlation between time in the office and productivity (in the office). The negative correlation that was spoken of is a very measured effect, multiple studies and articles can be found [0] using the same tool that you so kindly used to define benevolent sexism to me with. [0]:https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
  - MAGZine 11y ago
    Current understanding is, I think, humans are subject to DIMINISHING returns on work beyond a certain point, eventually subject to negative returns. But there IS certainly a gap between 40-hr work-week, and writing terrible buggy code because you're burnt out. Putting in a few longer days a few times a month, you won't burn out, you will get more done, and yes, it is harder on you.
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      IIRC, after around 60 hours of coding, developers start introducing bugs faster than they fix them. This obviously varies from person to person, but yeah, you can do negative work pretty easily in software by not thinking. It took me a long time to learn to just quit for the day and get a good night's sleep when i'm struggling with something for an excessively long time.
marssaxman 11y ago
I would prefer flexible work arrangements for the very simple reason that there are lots of things I want to do with my life in addition to my job. Nobody ever offers this, somehow. It would be a better world if flexible work hours were a normal thing, not something you have to justify based on traditional gender roles. I feel a little bitter when people go on about the importance of "negotiation" over job offers, because the thing I would want to negotiate for is never on the table. (And yes, I have tried.)
- softawre 11y ago
  What exactly are you asking for? At ININ, we have core hours of 10-4, and you can fill out the rest however you want. Seems a decent compromise for a salary employee gig. If you want real flexible hours you can always do contract work or start a business.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    I don't want to do contract work or start a business (again). That would make the problem worse, not better, because I'd have to spend more of my time on my job in order to make a living, and the additional time would be spent on tasks I enjoy less and am not as good at as the work I do which is the focus of my career. The point is that I have a wide variety of interests and to me a good life is one where I get to pursue them. Focusing exclusively on a single activity (coding!) might be better in terms of making money, but what am I making that money for if I can't use it to live a good life in the other ways I want to live it? Your response illustrates the problem I was describing: why, when I suggest that the standard packages don't suit me, do you think it is helpful to suggest that I just pick one of them and deal with it? Why shouldn't we accept, as an industry, that different people have different needs and different motivations, and consider it normal to work out whatever mix of time, responsibility, and compensation suits each person? The paradox of the salaried job is that you can either have money to spend or time to spend it in, but you can't have both, because nobody will let you trade some of one for some of the other. Well, why not? If we adopted a flexible attitude about work hours, as a culture, it would not just make things better for women who are stuck with traditional family-care tasks, but for everyone - whether they want to use that flexibility to raise a family or for something else important to their life happiness.
com2kid 11y ago
> What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. From my graduating class, going into the same company, men earned more money. I know first hand that earned 10k more than a female classmate going into the exact same job title with the same expectations.
dvdcxn 11y ago
>Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. Unfair obligation my ass. I'm sure most dads would jump at the oppurtunity to have the paternity leave equal to maternity, for example.
- qntty 11y ago
  At many places they do: zero days for both.
hasenj 11y ago
> unfair obligation to child-raising duties I'd find it very disturbing if someone would actually think that ...

WalterSear 11y ago

I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. There may be very good reasons for the disparity in pay.

tehwalrus 11y ago
There is; a negative correlation. Humans are much, much less efficient when tired/overworked.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  Don't be facetious: that's not at all what we are talking about here.
  - SamBam 11y ago
    It's not remotely facetious. Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.
    - WalterSear 11y ago
      >Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. Now you've erected a strawmen: no one said anything about doubling your hours. Good luck with your agenda and prejudice.
      - Vraxx 11y ago
        I think the point he was trying to make still holds without such absurd multipliers as "doubling", it's just an intuitively easy to grasp multiplier. What he's saying is that increasing your number of hours may get more absolute work done, but proportionally a person accomplishes less as more hours are worked. Thus, the correlation between time in office (hours) and productivity (work accomplished per unit time) is a negative correlation.
        WalterSear 11y ago
        You are implying that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. This is, in the frame of this discussion, in itself implicitly sexist. Women aren't asking for flex time in order to relax: they want flex time in order to do work that isn't business related, like taking care of their family. So the same number of hours are being worked - the question is whether using these extra hours to do company business is more beneficial to the company than doing something else. Quite frankly, it's kind of a ridiculous discussion. I can't see how it isn't driven by implicit benevolent sexist assumptions. https://www.google.com/search?q=benevolent+sexism https://www.google.com/search?q=benevolent+sexism
        Vraxx 11y ago
        Woah woah woah, slow down. You are infering that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. I was not saying anything at all about time spent outside the job. I was trying to clarify the argument that you were responding to by demonstrating how it is not a straw man. To follow the argument from it's origins, you led with >I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. And you were later responding to SamBam saying >Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. Which I was clarifying was not exactly a straw man because the fact that he chose "double" the hours was merely a hyperbole to demonstrate that productivity (in the office) does not scale positively with time spent (in the office). So we are talking about correlation between time in the office and productivity (in the office). The negative correlation that was spoken of is a very measured effect, multiple studies and articles can be found [0] using the same tool that you so kindly used to define benevolent sexism to me with. [0]:https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
- MAGZine 11y ago
  Current understanding is, I think, humans are subject to DIMINISHING returns on work beyond a certain point, eventually subject to negative returns. But there IS certainly a gap between 40-hr work-week, and writing terrible buggy code because you're burnt out. Putting in a few longer days a few times a month, you won't burn out, you will get more done, and yes, it is harder on you.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    IIRC, after around 60 hours of coding, developers start introducing bugs faster than they fix them. This obviously varies from person to person, but yeah, you can do negative work pretty easily in software by not thinking. It took me a long time to learn to just quit for the day and get a good night's sleep when i'm struggling with something for an excessively long time.

marssaxman 11y ago

I would prefer flexible work arrangements for the very simple reason that there are lots of things I want to do with my life in addition to my job. Nobody ever offers this, somehow. It would be a better world if flexible work hours were a normal thing, not something you have to justify based on traditional gender roles. I feel a little bitter when people go on about the importance of "negotiation" over job offers, because the thing I would want to negotiate for is never on the table. (And yes, I have tried.)

softawre 11y ago
What exactly are you asking for? At ININ, we have core hours of 10-4, and you can fill out the rest however you want. Seems a decent compromise for a salary employee gig. If you want real flexible hours you can always do contract work or start a business.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  I don't want to do contract work or start a business (again). That would make the problem worse, not better, because I'd have to spend more of my time on my job in order to make a living, and the additional time would be spent on tasks I enjoy less and am not as good at as the work I do which is the focus of my career. The point is that I have a wide variety of interests and to me a good life is one where I get to pursue them. Focusing exclusively on a single activity (coding!) might be better in terms of making money, but what am I making that money for if I can't use it to live a good life in the other ways I want to live it? Your response illustrates the problem I was describing: why, when I suggest that the standard packages don't suit me, do you think it is helpful to suggest that I just pick one of them and deal with it? Why shouldn't we accept, as an industry, that different people have different needs and different motivations, and consider it normal to work out whatever mix of time, responsibility, and compensation suits each person? The paradox of the salaried job is that you can either have money to spend or time to spend it in, but you can't have both, because nobody will let you trade some of one for some of the other. Well, why not? If we adopted a flexible attitude about work hours, as a culture, it would not just make things better for women who are stuck with traditional family-care tasks, but for everyone - whether they want to use that flexibility to raise a family or for something else important to their life happiness.

com2kid 11y ago

> What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. From my graduating class, going into the same company, men earned more money. I know first hand that earned 10k more than a female classmate going into the exact same job title with the same expectations.

dvdcxn 11y ago

>Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. Unfair obligation my ass. I'm sure most dads would jump at the oppurtunity to have the paternity leave equal to maternity, for example.

qntty 11y ago
At many places they do: zero days for both.

hasenj 11y ago

> unfair obligation to child-raising duties I'd find it very disturbing if someone would actually think that ...