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> It turns out that many (most?) people prefer to live a more expensive lifestyle which requires more hours of work. I don't know that this is quite true. I h
by laaph 10y ago
> It turns out that many (most?) people prefer to live a more expensive lifestyle which requires more hours of work.
I don't know that this is quite true. I have asked many employers for fewer hours and more vacation time in exchange for less money. I am always refused. I am frequently offered more money but never more vacation time.
I work as a contractor now, but even now my main client is begging me for more hours. The only people I've seen who successfully negotiate for fewer hours are those so vital to the business that they'd rather have that part time employee than no employee at all.
Mind you that's anecdotes and all that.
> One consequence of this is that, since the number of people who prefer this is large enough that they've established a norm in many industries which makes it harder to find an employer willing to hire a worker that's going to put in fewer hours.
I actually see it as the ones with the power get to write the rules, and make things seem normal. Even if I'd prefer to work fewer hours, I still need some money to survive, and can't quite go jobless.
- fweespeech 10y ago> I don't know that this is quite true. I have asked many employers for fewer hours and more vacation time in exchange for less money. I am always refused. I am frequently offered more money but never more vacation time. I've managed, once, to get the full vacation time for seniority (i.e. At N years you get +1 week) by threatening to quit after being offered a 5 figure raise. So I'd agree with you. I've never known anyone to get away with pushing past the upper limit on their seniority track for vacation.
- mac01021 10y agoAt my company everyone gets 3 weeks, nonnegotiable. But they let you supplement it with unpaid leave, which works out to the approximately the same thing if you get a corresponding pay raise. I guess other companies are probably frequently less accommodating.
- natrius 10y agoBuying lots of stuff from one person is cheaper than buying some stuff from lots of people. This difference is caused by transaction costs—the effort required to go from desire to purchased solution—and it's core to the theory of why firms form in the first place[1]. Every employer wants as few employees as possible to get a given amount of value because it costs less. They're not against fewer hours just because they're mean or stuck in their ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
- phil21 10y agoThis, and the fact that if you let your Rock Star(tm) have special treatment of 25 hrs/wk and 8 weeks of vacation the folks who can barely get a day's worth of productivity of that guy done in a week will complain incessantly to the point of it being a real problem. I say this having attempted to run a "egalitarian" team for well over a decade now. I've learned some lessons along the way. Basically reality doesn't matter to most people - perception does. If it's perceived that one employee is getting "special treatment" the rest demand it, deservedly or not. It doesn't matter if that employee does 5 times the work. I still operate on the "Get your work done, and I don't give a shit if you're on the beach while you're on Slack with me" premise, but I understand this is only for a very select subsection of employees. The rest simply cannot handle it, and most companies take the easy/lazy way out and simply try to treat everyone as an equal as it results in far less drama. I think this is completely unacceptable, and high performers deserve to be treated as such.