8 ms·
This is great, but isn't that a 40 hour work week? Most places consider 9-5 to be 8 hours (lunch and coffee breaks count towards the total). If we accept this
by acangiano 10y ago
This is great, but isn't that a 40 hour work week? Most places consider 9-5 to be 8 hours (lunch and coffee breaks count towards the total).
If we accept this convention, your workers are technically there for 9 hours a day for 4 days and 4 hours on Friday. Still clocking in 40 hours.
Nevertheless, I'm sure they enjoy their half day off on Friday and the work culture that put it in place.
- mc32 10y agoRegardless whether you count lunch breaks or not as working hours, the fact they get to leave at twelve on Friday is different from most companies. I'd certainly prefer that schedule over the normal schedule.
- kirykl 10y agolunch and coffee breaks count towards 8 hour work day? usually 8 hour work day = 4 hours work before lunch and 4 hours work after
- vtlynch 10y agoIt should, yes.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoDifference between US and Europe, maybe? In Europe so far I haven't seen the case where lunch time doesn't count into work time (assuming you get lunch time at all - many employers in low-skill fields use every dirty trick in the book to extract work out of people).
- vtlynch 10y agoIt is certainly common practice to not include lunch as work time in the US. But I think that is unfair to the employee. In the US almost all Low-skill jobs that pay by the hour dont count lunch as work time. At those jobs you usually explicitly "clock out" for lunch. At salaried jobs it is less common, though I'd guess 50% or more don't count lunch as work time. If that is the case, then workers should also be allowed to eat at their desk (or otherwise eat while working - reading emails on phone, etc) and leave early if they spend less than an hour at lunch.
- nocman 10y agoPerhaps this is regional, but I don't know anyone in a salaried position that gets paid for lunch time. It is always expected that you are working 8 hours a day outside of the lunch hour. To be clear, I live in the United States.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI have a cousin with a union job. Her union negotiated 8 hour day with mandatory paid half hour lunch. The lunch is negotiated as mandatory so they go around and make everyone leave their cubicles at lunch time. Perhaps to make sure no bosses are expecting people to work through lunch.
- Jade_Jet 10y agoI started work at 9. I'm responding to your comment while eating lunch at a restaurant. I plan to leave around 5 today. This is my normal schedule. I'm salaried and live in the US as well. My last two jobs were the same way as well.
- vtlynch 10y agoThat's great :) Just how it should be.
- bencoder 10y agoSame in UK - My work week is considered 37.5 hours with work day of 9-17:30.
- Atropos 10y agoTotally the opposite experience - normal 40 hour week means working 9 AM to 6 PM, due to 1 hour lunch break. This is even the case in most public administrations (Germany, France, EU Commission), I'm quite curious where a 9 AM to 5 PM day is normal...
- jawilson2 10y agoI count my work day as "time spent commuting, working, or anything else keeping me from spending time at home with my family."
- camelNotation 10y agoMe too. It isn't time off just because I'm not producing for an employer. If it requires me to commute, walk, etc. and it is work related, I classify that as working hours because those are the hours of my day that are given to my employer, even if they are not getting an immediate, direct benefit from those minutes. I realize I am not being paid for that time, but it doesn't change the fact that I am doing that instead of something else.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoIf you are salaried, you are being paid for that time. The effect is to reduce your effective hourly wage. I quit my last employer because the extra 2 hours required for commuting and dressing (both of which incur unreimbursed expenses) on top of my 9 billable hours was taking up a significant chunk of my compensation.
- __derek__ 10y agoI co-sign this. If you want me to be in a location, any time spent conveying myself or being there counts.
- 35bge57dtjku 10y agoI wish I could live in that fantasy world, where my hour commute both ways and my lunch break counted as working. Then I'd only have to do 5 hours of work while my coworkers did 7, and we'd all get paid the same.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoPerhaps you should take up smoking cigarettes then? My coworkers take four 20-minute smoke breaks a day.
- camelNotation 10y agoI work through lunch, eating at my desk. I prefer to do this over wasting time away from the office. 1 hour is not enough for me to go home and see my kids or work on my house or do anything legitimately useful or meaningful. Instead, I find myself being forced to fill it with something I wouldn't otherwise want to do. Therefore, I just grab a sandwich and eat while working. Officially, we aren't supposed to do this. Unofficially, no one has stopped me yet.
- mk89 10y agoIn my experience, lunch with your colleagues is one of the indicators of a healthy work environment. When this doesn't happen, for whatever reason you may have, I have always found the team to be unhealthy. How is it for you?
- protomok 10y agoIn my team we usually eat lunch at our cubes while being stuck on conference calls with folks from our local office, California, and Europe. Not sure if this counts as having lunch with colleagues :)
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI don't do lunch with my colleagues because I don't eat lunch. Even if I did eat lunch I don't want to waste more time at work than I have to so I would nibble at my desk while coding. Our team is perfectly healthy. I can't imagine lunch taking a full hour, seems like a waste of time to me though I know other people have different opinions on this, it's individual preference. Do you have mandatory lunch times and locations? Doesn't anyone ever want to spend their lunch break exercising or taking a walk? Or even going home to eat with their families? These are all common in my office. What if you hired a Muslim who fasted for Ramadan? Will you force them to watch everyone else eat?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI have similar approach. I like to eat lunch at my desk - even if my hands are full so I am not coding on the work project per se, I can at least be reading something. I have plenty of opportunities to talk to my teammates during the rest of the day anyway. As for hour+-long lunches, I don't get it either. I guess some people like it - in the same way in which I like to come home and work on my own projects. Everyone wants to allocate time on stuff they like. I don't particularly fancy eating with people.
- jhummel 10y agoI guess I have never had a job that counts lunch as an hour, or heard of such a job! My wife, friends, etc. all seem to do a 8-5 with breaks and a lunch hour. I guess I've technically been working 45 hours all my life if that's the case.
- bryondowd 10y agoI've had the opposite experience. Spent 6 years working in one professional position and another year at a second, where my lunch counted toward my hours, so a 40 hour week meant I arrived at work 8 hours prior to leaving work. When I finally started my current position and they explained that my lunch break was off the clock, I was shocked. Now I've added this difference to the things I have to account for when considering a new position. And, when it comes down to it, all that really matters to me is the number of hours that pass between stepping out my front door and returning through it. So I suppose unpaid lunch time falls in with commute time as time that I'm not technically giving to the company, but is still heavily impacted by my work requirements. In fact, the main draw of my current position over the last was cutting over an hour commute to 15 minutes, each way. Saved over 8 hours in commute time at the cost of 2.5 hours for an unpaid half hour lunch.
- softawre 10y agoMost places in the US don't count lunch. 8-5 or 9-6 are normal 8 hour days, or 8:30-5 if you take a 30m lunch.
- aaronbrethorst 10y agoI have never worked in a salaried position where this is true. Citation needed.
- jocro 10y agoAnecdotal, but I'm in exactly that situation at a fairly large tech employer. We log hours against different projects, are expected to log 40 hours a week, and are specifically instructed not to log anything for a non-working lunch.
- taurath 10y agoBilling clients or projects per hour is like billing lines of code. It's a metric that doesn't correlate to real productivity as much as some people think.
- greenshackle 10y agoI guess it makes about as much sense as paying employees per hour.
- r00fus 10y agoOften especially for salaried consultants, the client billed hours count towards your bonus (which is a part of the overall compensation). That said, most folks in such roles often work through the lunch. This is a bad habit but logical outcome of such comp structures.
- dredmorbius 10y agoBillings and pay rate basis are parts of a large lie in business. Revenues are based on customer value, supplier costs, and relative bargaining positions between the two, which moves the balance between the two. The party that can't walk away is the party that loses. Pay needs to similarly compensate for the provisioning cost of labour, fully accounted. If you're not paying your employees what theey need to survive and raise families, you're not creating wealth but are extracting liquidity. How you pay isn't terribly significant, though bad bases, such as piecework, are often long-term harmful. Marginal cost and value are, I'm increasingly convinced, in many ways a distraction. Not entirely, but they confound the matter. Guy named Smith had a lot to say on this a ways back.