10 ms·

Stretching 2 hours of work into an 8-9 hour day through meetings and sneaky Reddit/hn usage is certainly bad for our brains. But this is the norm as long as man

Stretching 2 hours of work into an 8-9 hour day through meetings and sneaky Reddit/hn usage is certainly bad for our brains. But this is the norm as long as managers interpret productivity as butts in seats.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
As bad as you think this is here, trust me Korea is worse.
- Kinnard 10y ago
  I've gotten this sentiment before. Does it appear to be improving at all in Korea?
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    If you look at the younger generation, I doubt it. Korea is a wonderful country full of extremely bright and nice people. But they're caught in an education arms race that is legitimately terrifying. Kids are schooled with incredible tenacity from 9 to 5 and then once they are finished school they attend night classes and weekend classes. I think putting a much higher weight on fluid intelligence over crystallized intelligence in the CSAT might be useful for mitigating this dynamic. However, I'm not sure what could be done do avoid the equally terrifying working hours dynamic.
    - Kinnard 10y ago
      I wonder what impact Korean reunification would have. I imagine it would create a large leisure class, supported by a new North Korean cheap-labor underclass, with which would come a leisure culture which could impact the overall culture. Some bad, with some good.
      - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
        I sort of think tests of crystallized intelligence, after a certain point, are basicly very inefficient marshmallow tests, tests of diligence rather than valuable abilities. I suspect relying near-exclusively on tests of fluid intelligence would work much better and would allow Korean children to avoid throwing their leisure time on a pyre, as there are extremely limited returns to studying for general intelligence tests. As much of this is a status game, I doubt an underclass would mitigate it at all.
      - civilian 10y ago
        I think your understanding of class is off. I mean, what would an underclass really do to turn south koreans into a leisure class? The point of working crazy hard is to jostle for position with the people at or above your social position.
    - reedlaw 10y ago
      9 to 5 school sounds like a breeze compared to China. Kids in China are doing 7 to 7 while in middle school (with piles of homework to do during lunch break and in the evening). In high school there is no leaving campus except for once a month.
      - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
        9 to 5 followed by night classes and weekend classes, which include large amounts of homework. That is their normal school has homework and their separate night/weekend school also assigns homework. It seems basicly comparable.
      - Hydraulix989 10y ago
        It is common for high-achieving US high schools to do similar hours too. My alarm was set to 6:15 AM (I optimized it so I could sleep in as late as possible -- perfected the art of getting ready in 15 minutes because I was in such a zombified state of sleep deprivation every morning), got to school at 7 AM trying my best to concentrate for the next 8 hours on fast-paced AP honors coursework. School ended at 3 PM, and that didn't mean "time to go home" -- a full plate of after school activities lasted until 7 PM (I did cross country and track so that meant running 6+ miles). When I got home, I had 5+ hours of homework (most of the work was busywork and not helpful prep for the AP tests, either -_-) to do, and I need at least an hour of time for mental sanity to decompress and play Counter-Strike right before bedtime, often this ended up being 2 or 3 hours, perpetuating the cycle. I would have lost my mind otherwise... Weekends were spent catching up on sleep, studying for the SATs, and finishing the huge backlog of homework that accumulated during the week, but that's when I didn't have to travel several hours by bus to all-day track meets on Saturdays. I'm doing a startup now, and it's not NEARLY as much work as American top tier college-bound high school.
        reedlaw 10y ago
        That's a lot more extracurricular activity and exercise than average Chinese students get. And forget about computer games. Many students are not allowed to use a cellphone on weekdays. Once they go off to college, however, they experience the first taste of freedom and some become addicted to computer games as attested by the abundance of internet cafes near college campuses.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
Why are you so sure that this is a bad thing for our brains? I find it difficult to tell what is work and what isn't (I work from home). I wonder how studies like this make that distinction. As you say, being at your workplace doesn't necesarily mean you're actually working.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Working from home is unique - many people find lines getting blurred. The bigger difference is in what your downtime is like. Working from home, you can eat or listen to music or go out of the house to the doctor's office. Take a shower, lounge about, talk to the kids or wife or friends or simply goof off. In the office, you still have to be in the office and looking like you are being productive. Maybe you have to be available for the sporadic work or customer, and you still have to make peace with the annoying coworker. Some places, non-job internet use (even through your phone) is prohibited, so you are sneaking about doing it, always trying to be aware.The whole point is that your time isn't really yours. You are stuck. There. Waiting and passing the time.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Pretending to work often ends up as long term low level stress which is surprisingly bad for you. Stress is there to deal with physical lions; think long term sacrifice for short term survival not superpowers. The extreme version might be combat, but hyper awareness around threats can apply for much longer periods. Sure, a few hours a week is no big deal, but that's not 4-10 hours a day for decades.
  - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    You're describing some things you don't like about being at work, but how do we know which of all these things are actually detrimental to brain function? Why is programming, being in a meeting, making peace with the annoying coworker or having to be sneaky about reading HN more damaging to our brains than playing a shooter game at home for five hours, having a heated debate with a friend, bingeing on some TV show or contributing to an open source project in your spare time? Maybe the only thing that really matters is whether we are forced to keep doing something once we get tired of it and would rather do something else. Maybe all this study reveals is for how many hours the average worker likes doing what they are forced to do at work. That wouldn't tell us very about what work does to the brain function of someone who is exceptionally motivated and loves to keep doing what they do for 16 hours per day.
BjoernKW 10y ago
As much as I agree with that I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today. It's almost as if everybody wakes up, reads Dilbert every morning thinking "Wow, that PHB guy certainly is a role model to aspire to." It's not as if these patterns can't be changed: The required technology has been available for more than a decade now. There are tried and tested approaches for organizing work in a more productive and healthy manner than 9-5. Still, it isn't happening at a larger scale. While the reasons might simply be risk-aversion or - on a more sinister note - a somewhat implicit understanding that our society is built around a 40 hr work week and we'd face serious upheaval if that was no longer a given, I find those reasons to be tenuous at best in the long run.
- tonmoy 10y ago
  Can you name a few companies where this is practiced? Maybe if we all start going to those places (I would happily take less pay for a healthier/happier work life) then maybe our managers would start following them
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  Because those of us who believe otherwise usually get beaten out and decide to not run businesses any more. My confounder doesn't like hiring, likes to have a huge pile of cash in the bank to no particular end, and sends people shitty emails if they're late in the morning. He's successfully killed off enthusiasm and passion for getting things done (mine included), and now people are either making time or leaving. We got crazy amounts done back when I wasn't cto and was still allowed to lead the tech team - because we'd work from 1pm until the early hours, myopically working on stuff because it was fun to create. That got slowly but surely strangled by timekeeping, requiring people to be in for 0900 (even if they were up half the night working support), and requiring that people only work from the office. It's impossible to push back against without continuous effort, and eventually one throws the towel in. Conservatism is easy as it requires you to just maintain the status quo, hence it is the norm in business - whereas change requires effort. It then turns into an endurance race, which can only go one way. Edit: I don't know why I bother commenting here any more.
yyyuuu 10y ago
The problem might be of lack of trust between a manager and his team. He assumes that most would shirk work given the slightest chance.
bqe 10y ago
Time spent at work is easy to measure. Productivity is difficult to measure.
snowwrestler 10y ago
Is this you? If so, why aren't you seeking out more work to do, since you have so much free time? I know this sounds snarky, but I have never seen a company that didn't have undone work. And I've rarely met colleagues who didn't appreciate a helping hand when they were busy.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  It comes down to cost-benefit: on net, will doing this thing create more positive things (e.g., personal reward, recognition, compensation) than negative things (e.g., dealing with bureaucracy, being hassled, getting entangled in organizational politics)? If it's net negative, there's no reason to do it. Now, that's inherently pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to actual work environments. There's also an argument for recognizing this situation and doing something about it (i.e. quitting to do something else), although that can be easier said than done, depending on one's circumstances.
- derefr 10y ago
  Likely: zero equity, and a negotiated wage that is less than the opportunity-cost of one's time because it had an expectation of "slack" calculated into it by the employer. Most retail jobs have these properties.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    I worked and managed retail for several years. There was always more work that needed to be done. Retail stores are messy, and sales correlate positively with clean, attractive merchandising. Customers are needy, and sales correlate positively with customer service.
    - derefr 10y ago
      I didn't mean "slack" as in "free time because there isn't anything to do"; I meant "slack" as in "extra tolerance because—at a given wage—an average employee will predictably goof off X% of the time." This is how all large chains (McDonalds, WalMart, etc.) are managed from a corporate perspective. Instead of paying X salary to ensure enough "morale" for optimal worker productivity, it is actually more cost-effective to pay workers a lower wage such that they're sub-optimally productive—but still productive—and then put systems in place to both idiot-proof and peer-quality-check each employee's output, such that the output is still guaranteed even with multiple "malfunctioning" process-nodes potentially touching it. The epitome of this approach is seen in how an "automatic" Amazon Mechanical Turk work pipeline operates at scale: a program hands off work-items to workers, and then treats each individual work-product as being of unknown quality, handing it off to further workers to give a quality-judgement to it, cross-checking those workers' opinions in case some of them are just mashing "good", etc. None of this would be necessary if the work paid well-enough for market-forces to apply (i.e. if people would want to compete for the work.) But since it doesn't pay, people aren't interested in one-upping one-another's quality to steal the job, so you just end up with whoever decided to wander in. See also: the economic "Losers" in the MacLeod Hierarchy.
biot 10y ago
What would you change? If you were a manager, would you expect people to put in only 2 hours of actual work per day, regardless of when their butt is in the seat?
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
is certainly bad for our brains Why? Can you elaborate on this point? What makes you so certain that doing so is bad for our brains? Bad in what way? Is the badness cumulative and irreparable? Is it temporary and reversible? Maybe it's good for our brains because it's less stressful than trying to cram 15 hours work in a 9 hour day.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago

As bad as you think this is here, trust me Korea is worse.

Kinnard 10y ago
I've gotten this sentiment before. Does it appear to be improving at all in Korea?
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  If you look at the younger generation, I doubt it. Korea is a wonderful country full of extremely bright and nice people. But they're caught in an education arms race that is legitimately terrifying. Kids are schooled with incredible tenacity from 9 to 5 and then once they are finished school they attend night classes and weekend classes. I think putting a much higher weight on fluid intelligence over crystallized intelligence in the CSAT might be useful for mitigating this dynamic. However, I'm not sure what could be done do avoid the equally terrifying working hours dynamic.
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    I wonder what impact Korean reunification would have. I imagine it would create a large leisure class, supported by a new North Korean cheap-labor underclass, with which would come a leisure culture which could impact the overall culture. Some bad, with some good.
    - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
      I sort of think tests of crystallized intelligence, after a certain point, are basicly very inefficient marshmallow tests, tests of diligence rather than valuable abilities. I suspect relying near-exclusively on tests of fluid intelligence would work much better and would allow Korean children to avoid throwing their leisure time on a pyre, as there are extremely limited returns to studying for general intelligence tests. As much of this is a status game, I doubt an underclass would mitigate it at all.
    - civilian 10y ago
      I think your understanding of class is off. I mean, what would an underclass really do to turn south koreans into a leisure class? The point of working crazy hard is to jostle for position with the people at or above your social position.
  - reedlaw 10y ago
    9 to 5 school sounds like a breeze compared to China. Kids in China are doing 7 to 7 while in middle school (with piles of homework to do during lunch break and in the evening). In high school there is no leaving campus except for once a month.
    - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
      9 to 5 followed by night classes and weekend classes, which include large amounts of homework. That is their normal school has homework and their separate night/weekend school also assigns homework. It seems basicly comparable.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      It is common for high-achieving US high schools to do similar hours too. My alarm was set to 6:15 AM (I optimized it so I could sleep in as late as possible -- perfected the art of getting ready in 15 minutes because I was in such a zombified state of sleep deprivation every morning), got to school at 7 AM trying my best to concentrate for the next 8 hours on fast-paced AP honors coursework. School ended at 3 PM, and that didn't mean "time to go home" -- a full plate of after school activities lasted until 7 PM (I did cross country and track so that meant running 6+ miles). When I got home, I had 5+ hours of homework (most of the work was busywork and not helpful prep for the AP tests, either -_-) to do, and I need at least an hour of time for mental sanity to decompress and play Counter-Strike right before bedtime, often this ended up being 2 or 3 hours, perpetuating the cycle. I would have lost my mind otherwise... Weekends were spent catching up on sleep, studying for the SATs, and finishing the huge backlog of homework that accumulated during the week, but that's when I didn't have to travel several hours by bus to all-day track meets on Saturdays. I'm doing a startup now, and it's not NEARLY as much work as American top tier college-bound high school.
      - reedlaw 10y ago
        That's a lot more extracurricular activity and exercise than average Chinese students get. And forget about computer games. Many students are not allowed to use a cellphone on weekdays. Once they go off to college, however, they experience the first taste of freedom and some become addicted to computer games as attested by the abundance of internet cafes near college campuses.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

Why are you so sure that this is a bad thing for our brains? I find it difficult to tell what is work and what isn't (I work from home). I wonder how studies like this make that distinction. As you say, being at your workplace doesn't necesarily mean you're actually working.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Working from home is unique - many people find lines getting blurred. The bigger difference is in what your downtime is like. Working from home, you can eat or listen to music or go out of the house to the doctor's office. Take a shower, lounge about, talk to the kids or wife or friends or simply goof off. In the office, you still have to be in the office and looking like you are being productive. Maybe you have to be available for the sporadic work or customer, and you still have to make peace with the annoying coworker. Some places, non-job internet use (even through your phone) is prohibited, so you are sneaking about doing it, always trying to be aware.The whole point is that your time isn't really yours. You are stuck. There. Waiting and passing the time.
- Retric 10y ago
  Pretending to work often ends up as long term low level stress which is surprisingly bad for you. Stress is there to deal with physical lions; think long term sacrifice for short term survival not superpowers. The extreme version might be combat, but hyper awareness around threats can apply for much longer periods. Sure, a few hours a week is no big deal, but that's not 4-10 hours a day for decades.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  You're describing some things you don't like about being at work, but how do we know which of all these things are actually detrimental to brain function? Why is programming, being in a meeting, making peace with the annoying coworker or having to be sneaky about reading HN more damaging to our brains than playing a shooter game at home for five hours, having a heated debate with a friend, bingeing on some TV show or contributing to an open source project in your spare time? Maybe the only thing that really matters is whether we are forced to keep doing something once we get tired of it and would rather do something else. Maybe all this study reveals is for how many hours the average worker likes doing what they are forced to do at work. That wouldn't tell us very about what work does to the brain function of someone who is exceptionally motivated and loves to keep doing what they do for 16 hours per day.

BjoernKW 10y ago

As much as I agree with that I'm still at a loss as to why butts in seats management is still so dominant today. It's almost as if everybody wakes up, reads Dilbert every morning thinking "Wow, that PHB guy certainly is a role model to aspire to." It's not as if these patterns can't be changed: The required technology has been available for more than a decade now. There are tried and tested approaches for organizing work in a more productive and healthy manner than 9-5. Still, it isn't happening at a larger scale. While the reasons might simply be risk-aversion or - on a more sinister note - a somewhat implicit understanding that our society is built around a 40 hr work week and we'd face serious upheaval if that was no longer a given, I find those reasons to be tenuous at best in the long run.

tonmoy 10y ago
Can you name a few companies where this is practiced? Maybe if we all start going to those places (I would happily take less pay for a healthier/happier work life) then maybe our managers would start following them
madaxe_again 10y ago
Because those of us who believe otherwise usually get beaten out and decide to not run businesses any more. My confounder doesn't like hiring, likes to have a huge pile of cash in the bank to no particular end, and sends people shitty emails if they're late in the morning. He's successfully killed off enthusiasm and passion for getting things done (mine included), and now people are either making time or leaving. We got crazy amounts done back when I wasn't cto and was still allowed to lead the tech team - because we'd work from 1pm until the early hours, myopically working on stuff because it was fun to create. That got slowly but surely strangled by timekeeping, requiring people to be in for 0900 (even if they were up half the night working support), and requiring that people only work from the office. It's impossible to push back against without continuous effort, and eventually one throws the towel in. Conservatism is easy as it requires you to just maintain the status quo, hence it is the norm in business - whereas change requires effort. It then turns into an endurance race, which can only go one way. Edit: I don't know why I bother commenting here any more.

yyyuuu 10y ago

The problem might be of lack of trust between a manager and his team. He assumes that most would shirk work given the slightest chance.

bqe 10y ago

Time spent at work is easy to measure. Productivity is difficult to measure.

snowwrestler 10y ago

Is this you? If so, why aren't you seeking out more work to do, since you have so much free time? I know this sounds snarky, but I have never seen a company that didn't have undone work. And I've rarely met colleagues who didn't appreciate a helping hand when they were busy.

__derek__ 10y ago
It comes down to cost-benefit: on net, will doing this thing create more positive things (e.g., personal reward, recognition, compensation) than negative things (e.g., dealing with bureaucracy, being hassled, getting entangled in organizational politics)? If it's net negative, there's no reason to do it. Now, that's inherently pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to actual work environments. There's also an argument for recognizing this situation and doing something about it (i.e. quitting to do something else), although that can be easier said than done, depending on one's circumstances.
derefr 10y ago
Likely: zero equity, and a negotiated wage that is less than the opportunity-cost of one's time because it had an expectation of "slack" calculated into it by the employer. Most retail jobs have these properties.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  I worked and managed retail for several years. There was always more work that needed to be done. Retail stores are messy, and sales correlate positively with clean, attractive merchandising. Customers are needy, and sales correlate positively with customer service.
  - derefr 10y ago
    I didn't mean "slack" as in "free time because there isn't anything to do"; I meant "slack" as in "extra tolerance because—at a given wage—an average employee will predictably goof off X% of the time." This is how all large chains (McDonalds, WalMart, etc.) are managed from a corporate perspective. Instead of paying X salary to ensure enough "morale" for optimal worker productivity, it is actually more cost-effective to pay workers a lower wage such that they're sub-optimally productive—but still productive—and then put systems in place to both idiot-proof and peer-quality-check each employee's output, such that the output is still guaranteed even with multiple "malfunctioning" process-nodes potentially touching it. The epitome of this approach is seen in how an "automatic" Amazon Mechanical Turk work pipeline operates at scale: a program hands off work-items to workers, and then treats each individual work-product as being of unknown quality, handing it off to further workers to give a quality-judgement to it, cross-checking those workers' opinions in case some of them are just mashing "good", etc. None of this would be necessary if the work paid well-enough for market-forces to apply (i.e. if people would want to compete for the work.) But since it doesn't pay, people aren't interested in one-upping one-another's quality to steal the job, so you just end up with whoever decided to wander in. See also: the economic "Losers" in the MacLeod Hierarchy.

biot 10y ago

What would you change? If you were a manager, would you expect people to put in only 2 hours of actual work per day, regardless of when their butt is in the seat?

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

is certainly bad for our brains Why? Can you elaborate on this point? What makes you so certain that doing so is bad for our brains? Bad in what way? Is the badness cumulative and irreparable? Is it temporary and reversible? Maybe it's good for our brains because it's less stressful than trying to cram 15 hours work in a 9 hour day.