6 ms·

> One programmer I know made clear when she started a job at a startup that she worked 40-45 hours a week and that's it. Everyone else worked much longer hours,

> One programmer I know made clear when she started a job at a startup that she worked 40-45 hours a week and that's it. Everyone else worked much longer hours, but that was her personal limit. Personally I have negotiated a 35-hour work week. Wow, what a depressing time to be employed. The old standard (35 hours) is now considered a "short" workweek, and only the most desirable employees have the leverage to request it. Not to mention stagnant wages, rapidly rising costs of living, and off-hour availability expectations. How did we end up here?

clw8 10y ago
Pointy Haired Bosses
softawre 10y ago
Where are you working? My team works 40 hours max (never overtime over the 3 years I've been the lead). We make great money for the Midwest.
- gthtjtkt 10y ago
  Small dev team at a non-tech company on the east coast, so all these nifty Silicon Valley management practices are unheard of here. At our company, you're lucky if you don't have to clock out and in for your lunch break... And I'm not one of those "most desirable" employees I mentioned earlier, so I'd be very lucky if I could negotiate for better hours or more vacation.
- flinty 10y ago
  What city? Thinking about moving from the northeast. Trying to figure out some options.
danharaj 10y ago
Labor and capital are in constant conflict. Labor basically died as a cohesive international movement by the 80's. Labor-hating ideology has dominated economic thought for decades.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>How did we end up here? MBAs and MBAification. When management is treated as a generic function that can be performed by a particular class of people in any field rather than the most senior expert practitioners in their respective fields, this is what happens. You get insecure authoritarians who latch on to (utterly wrong) metrics as a means of "understanding" what it is their subordinates do without actually understanding what it is they do. With software developers it used to be SLOC (thankfully that died). With GPs it's "number of patients seen". With teachers it's standardized test scores. There's a direct correlation between managerial technical ineptitude and insistence on working long hours.
- Asooka 10y ago
  I'm actually considering getting an MBA and pivoting to management-like positions just for the hell of it for a few years. Do you think that might be a feasible thing to do at my age (29 right now)?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Measurement is hard.
  - shostack 10y ago
    Can't upvote hard enough. Even in the digital media space I'm in, with all our endless data, picking the right thing to measure and measuring it the right way is extremely hard. Metrics have consequences as what gets measured gets managed, often to the detriment of everything else. Pick the wrong metric and you can shoot yourself in the foot inadvertently.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Here's how I manage to not just live in a cabin in the woods. If it's hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for the boss ( because scale ) . Even if the boss is an idiot, there's probably a lot more gain in cooperating and trying to fix it than in being belligerent. But broken measurement systems invite corruption. It's now possible for ... dishonorable cliques to overtake the measurement regime and bend it to their own advantage. Since they're going to be organized around the short term ( because that's how humans manage information overload - they go short term ), they're more likely to do things that will damage the organization for the long term. It's the circle of life :)
superuser2 10y ago
Easy. You hire more low skilled workers and run them in shifts because warm bodies are abundant and overtime is expensive. High skilled workers have a high fixed cost per employee, low to zero marginal cost per hour. More hours from fewer employees is an obvious strategy to deliver the growth shareholders demand. By convention and legislation, high skill jobs pay invariant of hours worked and are overtime-exempt. Low skilled jobs can be filled with whomever happens to be born nearby, so they can be distributed across small towns. High skilled jobs require the best people regardless of birthplace, and both employers and employees are incentivized to seek a large pool of potential counterparties to optimize wages and "fit." This naturally creates "destination" cities where inward migration of highly paid workers raises prices and therefore COL. Stagnant wages - because labor intensive businesses aren't good enough investments anymore to have lots of employers bidding up the price of labor (except in some niches).
nocman 10y ago
What "old standard"? For Europe maybe? (I honestly don't know if that's what you meant). If you are talking about the United States, people have had a 40 hour work week for much longer than I've been alive.
- tbihl 10y ago
  Maybe parent is saying (7 working+ 1 lunch)*5 days as a 35 hour week.
  - nocman 10y ago
    Huh? That's exactly what I was refuting. He was saying working 35 hours a week (7 hour days with lunch being paid) is "the old standard". My whole life I don't think I've ever known someone who got a paid lunch. Almost everyone I know works 40 hours a week outside of their lunch hours (at a minimum).

clw8 10y ago

Pointy Haired Bosses

softawre 10y ago

Where are you working? My team works 40 hours max (never overtime over the 3 years I've been the lead). We make great money for the Midwest.

gthtjtkt 10y ago
Small dev team at a non-tech company on the east coast, so all these nifty Silicon Valley management practices are unheard of here. At our company, you're lucky if you don't have to clock out and in for your lunch break... And I'm not one of those "most desirable" employees I mentioned earlier, so I'd be very lucky if I could negotiate for better hours or more vacation.
flinty 10y ago
What city? Thinking about moving from the northeast. Trying to figure out some options.

danharaj 10y ago

Labor and capital are in constant conflict. Labor basically died as a cohesive international movement by the 80's. Labor-hating ideology has dominated economic thought for decades.

crdoconnor 10y ago

>How did we end up here? MBAs and MBAification. When management is treated as a generic function that can be performed by a particular class of people in any field rather than the most senior expert practitioners in their respective fields, this is what happens. You get insecure authoritarians who latch on to (utterly wrong) metrics as a means of "understanding" what it is their subordinates do without actually understanding what it is they do. With software developers it used to be SLOC (thankfully that died). With GPs it's "number of patients seen". With teachers it's standardized test scores. There's a direct correlation between managerial technical ineptitude and insistence on working long hours.

Asooka 10y ago
I'm actually considering getting an MBA and pivoting to management-like positions just for the hell of it for a few years. Do you think that might be a feasible thing to do at my age (29 right now)?
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Measurement is hard.
- shostack 10y ago
  Can't upvote hard enough. Even in the digital media space I'm in, with all our endless data, picking the right thing to measure and measuring it the right way is extremely hard. Metrics have consequences as what gets measured gets managed, often to the detriment of everything else. Pick the wrong metric and you can shoot yourself in the foot inadvertently.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Here's how I manage to not just live in a cabin in the woods. If it's hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for the boss ( because scale ) . Even if the boss is an idiot, there's probably a lot more gain in cooperating and trying to fix it than in being belligerent. But broken measurement systems invite corruption. It's now possible for ... dishonorable cliques to overtake the measurement regime and bend it to their own advantage. Since they're going to be organized around the short term ( because that's how humans manage information overload - they go short term ), they're more likely to do things that will damage the organization for the long term. It's the circle of life :)

superuser2 10y ago

Easy. You hire more low skilled workers and run them in shifts because warm bodies are abundant and overtime is expensive. High skilled workers have a high fixed cost per employee, low to zero marginal cost per hour. More hours from fewer employees is an obvious strategy to deliver the growth shareholders demand. By convention and legislation, high skill jobs pay invariant of hours worked and are overtime-exempt. Low skilled jobs can be filled with whomever happens to be born nearby, so they can be distributed across small towns. High skilled jobs require the best people regardless of birthplace, and both employers and employees are incentivized to seek a large pool of potential counterparties to optimize wages and "fit." This naturally creates "destination" cities where inward migration of highly paid workers raises prices and therefore COL. Stagnant wages - because labor intensive businesses aren't good enough investments anymore to have lots of employers bidding up the price of labor (except in some niches).

nocman 10y ago

What "old standard"? For Europe maybe? (I honestly don't know if that's what you meant). If you are talking about the United States, people have had a 40 hour work week for much longer than I've been alive.

tbihl 10y ago
Maybe parent is saying (7 working+ 1 lunch)*5 days as a 35 hour week.
- nocman 10y ago
  Huh? That's exactly what I was refuting. He was saying working 35 hours a week (7 hour days with lunch being paid) is "the old standard". My whole life I don't think I've ever known someone who got a paid lunch. Almost everyone I know works 40 hours a week outside of their lunch hours (at a minimum).