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What happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?
- robert_foss 10y agoAs I remember the conclusions of this experiment were two-fold: * Employees are happier, more productive and less stressed * The cost of staff increased due to sustained wages for less worm
- bisby 10y agoSo basically: * if you have a job that requires X work be done. The more productive, happier employees still get X work done. If I'm happier and suddenly don't spend 2-3 hours of work time on reddit or hn, I can actually get MORE work done in less time. I imagine a lot of HN style jobs fit into this category. I know I can write more code when I'm well rested and thinking clearly. * if you have a job that requires Y hours be worked. You have to hire more staff to cover the extra hours. For example, hospital care (like the lady described in the article). If you need a hospital staffed 24/7, you now need 4 people to staff a single day instead of 3.
- gambiting 10y agoWell, yes, people here sometimes forget that not everyone sits behind a desk for 8 hours a day(in which case, sure, you are only productive 3-4 hours a day). There are jobs which require 8 hours of being present, doing something or not, and by reducing that time you simply have to hire more people.
- alkonaut 10y ago> if you have a job that requires Y hours be worked. You have to hire more staff to cover the extra hours. For example, hospital care (like the lady described in the article). If you need a hospital staffed 24/7, you now need 4 people to staff a single day instead of 3. That's the equation in its simplest first-order form. There are lots of factors you can put in the equation, of which you mentioned a few: - reduced employer cost for recruiting if people are happier in their jobs - reduced employer cost for sick leave/temps if employees are healthier - increased efficiency because employees are more efficient/make fewer mistakes - reduced healthcare costs for society if everyone is healthier - increased employer cost of training and education if more people need to do the same task - ... the list goes on and on. In a society with publicly funded healthcare, the cost of sick workers is triple: first the employee is replaced by a temporary, often more expensive nurse to fill in. Second, society pays the insurance/sick leave for the person home sick. Third, the sick person now causes more work for the same public organizations (healthcare). The costs of people in working age being ill is one of Swedens largest econommic problems at the moment. In a small scale experiment the large scale effect of a healther population can't be seen in the direct economic outcome but it can be estimated.
- VLM 10y agoI've worked in or near operations for my entire career and if it were not for $30K/yr cost of medical insurance it would be much cheaper to hire 4 people than 3. With 4, when someone is sick or it takes months to replace someone who quit, obviously experience shows 3 can handle the load of 4 much easier than 2 can handle the load of 3.
- wlll 10y agoGet more worm for your money, business 101.
- robert_foss 10y ago:p
- morinted 10y ago"I thought it would be really fun, but it felt kind of stressful," says Gabriel Peres, as he slots a Petri dish inside one of the 3D printers he's built for the company. "It's a process and it takes time and when you don't have all that [much] time it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up." That's a perspective I hadn't considered. Maybe the 6 hour work day makes more sense for service-based work like nursing, fast food, etc. For us techies it could actually be a nuisance (depending on how the individual works).
- creshal 10y agoAdditional nurses were brought in to spread the workload for the official study, and the general feedback was positive. In the private sector that informally participated, apparently no staff adjustments were made (or at least not mentioned). I'm not sure it depends on the sector.
- omouse 10y agoit kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up There's always more work to do! No surprise! This is why we automate so that the amount becomes smaller and that's why we cut things we don't need.
- Jtsummers 10y agoI'm "salaried", technically hourly but guaranteed 40-hours/week. They haven't approved us for overtime or comp time so I'm done when I hit 8. That hard stop has motivated a great deal of my automation at work. Projects I got pulled into had me doing 2-3 hours of busy work a couple times a week. Things that occupied my PC and attention for way too long. A handful of scripts later, I cd to the right directory, type the right command, and get back to whatever I'm supposed to actually be working on and that work that used to take almost a full day a week is done in the background in 20-30 minutes (less once they replace my computer with a new one, hopefully soon).
- balabaster 10y agoFor me, some days it would be awesome, on others it would be stressful as shit. What I would prefer is to work as long as I need to and when I come to a logical breaking point, I go home. Some days that may be 4 hours, other days that may be 12. Some things I can't easily break down into chunks that easily fit into 8 hours and not have me lose my place by going to sleep. Some days I get into a flow and I don't even realize I'm hungry until it's dark again and I suddenly realize everyone's gone to bed and left me on my own. Other days I struggle to figure out what I'm doing and the more I fight it, the harder the struggle becomes. It's not because of a lack of discipline or lack of want to work, it's just that I struggle to connect dots that when I'm on form just connect themselves. On days when I'm on form, I'm unstoppable, a machine that just churns out working, tested, simple, elegant solutions to problems. When I'm not on form, I can't figure out how chew gum without gagging. This seems to hinge on how much sleep I've had, which directly impedes the amount of time I have in a day... finding the balance between enough sleep and enough time to get work done to a high degree of quality is a constant struggle So I don't think changing the length of the work day for me even enters in to my psyche. It's always either far too long or nowhere near long enough... it would be the same if the work day was 2 hours long or 22 hours long. That's what it's like for me, I can't speak for everyone else.
- kristopolous 10y agoI've been doing sub-20 hour work weeks for a while now. I'd like to never go back to anywhere near 40. To the workaholics out there I say stop working extra for free. Those additional hours are unsolicited gifts to an employer who would fire you if it was possible. Stop giving your labor away, seriously.
- branchless 10y agoPeople are cornered by high rent/land prices. They understand this and hate it. The whole point behind high land prices is to prevent most people achieving financial independence. At this point the workers call the shots. This is why we are kept wage slaves.
- Ascetik 10y agoWhat does that have to do with working for free? Total non-sequitur.
- branchless 10y agoPeople are cowed by their employers, with little to no savings they live month to month and dare not say no to extra work tasks such as email in the evening etc. High rents are squeezing all disposable income leaving people with no financial autonomy. For me the american dream was all about financial autonomy. The USA had to have actual slaves because they had no land enclosure. Why work as a wage slave when you can walk up the road and work empty land? Land gives labour the choice. Land enclosure is required for wage slaves.
- st3v3r 10y agoI think he's talking about unpaid overtime.
- Retric 10y agoIn the US farm land averages under 4,500$ per acre. Now there are not a lot of physical jobs in those places, but if you are willing to work remote that's a non issue. On the other hand the median house in Iowa costs $126,300 a but a of cheap housing is less than that and just rented or constructed by the final home owner. In large part people live in city's because they want to live in cities. I pay close to 1/3 of my take home pay in rent because I like where I live.
- wlll 10y agoI commented on the previous thread about this, but I work somewhere between about 4-5 hours a day on average I think, have been doing so for the last 6 months. My productivity is now greater than it was when I worked 8, and I'm more relaxed and happier. I'm a contractor so it's relatively simple for me to do this, I'm in a lucky position in that I can afford to not work 8 hours, but personally I can really see a huge benefit.
- iraphael 10y agoOut of curiosity, is this a result of your employer having flexible working hours and you being able to get the work done in that time, or are you also being paid less? (or are you in freelance, etc?)
- wlll 10y agoI moved company last July from a full time job to contracting elsewhere. I'm now a contractor in the very real sense. I use my own computer, I work generally when I want to (I set the total hours at the beginning of any month and choose what hours to work when within that framework). In terms of pay, becoming a contractor means my pay went up and I can work 4 hours a day and do as well as I was full time, though I do try to work more like 4.5 - 5 hours a day (gotta pay that mortgage down). What this means is that I generally only work when I'm motivated and "feeling it", the rest of the time I relax, learn, program, climb etc. It may seem like I'm expensive at > 2x what I was on when full time, but I think I'm giving way more for the time I put in, eg. no % of an 8 hour day spent being tired or "slacking". For instance I stopped the clock to read HN :) I'm also way happier than I was before.
- cableshaft 10y agoOut of curiosity, when you made the transition, how did you find the first clients to work with? Did it require a lot of hunting down work?
- wlll 10y ago
- johansch 10y agoStrangely, this wasn't mentioned in this or the other English-language articles about this that I saw: The setup was to during 23 months test if six-hour days resulted in any meaningful improvement on the (rather high) amount of sick leave the employees used. The conclusion was that the amount of sick leave only went down with 0.6%.
- peeters 10y ago> During the first 18 months of the trial the nurses working shorter hours logged less sick leave, reported better perceived health and boosted their productivity by organising 85% more activities for their patients, from nature walks to sing-a-longs. How do you eliminate bias in a trial like this? I mean, a lot of people want to move to a 6-hour day, so they'll be working hard to prove they're productive in that format. That doesn't mean it'll be sustainable though once it becomes the new normal.
- erikb 10y agoAgreed. Not fully sure why we couldn't move there in steps. If 6 hours helps a lot, 7.5 hours should also show some improvement. And the cost to the economy is much smaller in case it's not working out.
- rileymat2 10y agoI am not sure this is the case. Maybe I am not thinking about this right, but if I feel like I can more effectively plan alternative activities that fit into 2 hours than I can an additional activity that would fit into 30 minutes. What I am saying, is there is no reason to believe that the benefits are linear. Think of it in another way, if I have to work one hour from 12 to 1, it removes any alternative activity that requires the whole day. I am just saying, that assuming it is a linear benefit is too big a jump for me.
- philh 10y agoerikb didn't assume the benefits were linear, just strictly increasing between 8 and 6.
- erikb 10y agoI thought so, too, but found in reality it's actually helpful. On one hand it doesn't really matter if you feel you have more time. On the other it also drastically increases your flexibility if you need to take off a few hours once, since that doesn't put you behind as many hours.
- 10y ago
- coldcode 10y agoI am all for having nurses and doctors work 6 hour days for regular pay. The idea that doctors should pull 24-48 hour shifts in hospitals is insane. The cost of this is virtually nothing compare to other expenses in hospitals.
- humanrebar 10y agoThey say the reason is to minimize handoffs and communication snafus (double-administering meds, for instance). That's a good point, and maybe a reason to have longer shifts for now, but long-term, there should be significant investments in hospital infrastructure so unforced errors are harder to make.
- nnq 10y agoThat's retarded. "communication snafus" happen when people are overworked, underpaid (relatively), and generally stop giving a fuck about doing their job because of this. A doctor working 6 h a day would have a significantly higher change of "giving a fuck about you as a patient". Let's stop glorifying overworking people in the name of efficiency. Modern technology and planning should allow 2 people working 4 hrs a day to do the same work as 1 working 8. If this doesn't happen, ignore what you've been told in business school, and fire your manager and hire a better one (hint: most managers are incompetent so you'll have to burn through a dozen or so until you find one gifted enough to extract productivity from part-timers, which your business probably can't afford... and this is why the world is how it is).
- Coding_Cat 10y agoPeople are always asking on here "what are some inefficiencies a startup needs to tackle" and I think this is a great example: Hospital support software. From what I've heard and seen it's a total nightmare across the globe in almost every use-case. Just having a way for doctors and nurses to put all information in one clear place while also combining with the infrastructure to enforce certain information (e.g. when medication is retrieved from storage, for who is it, and was it pre-approved) to help prevent things as double-dosing (or forgetting to dose). Doesn't sound easy tbh, but if you want a challenge here it is.
- Asooka 10y agoWhy didn't they scale back pay proportionally? Or would that make pay too low per person? Maybe I'm severely overpaid as a developer, but I would take a 25% pay cut for 25% less work.
- Sharlin 10y agoYep. There are few nurses who could reasonably afford any pay cut, never mind a 25% one.
- alkonaut 10y agoThat would make pay too low for e.g. nurse to be an attractive job, yes. It's possible that if this is tried in larger scale that e.g. employees will be offered either 90% pay for 80% work, or that a deal with unions is to freeze wage increases for N years in exchange for ever shortening work hours. > Maybe I'm severely overpaid as a developer, but I would take a 25% pay cut for 25% less work. As a swede and parent I'm entitled to that while I have kids < 8yo. Really good set up I think.
- brightball 10y agoIMO the need isn't for 6 hour workdays but for some regular outside of work time available during the work week. I work an 8:30-5:30 job and this ensures that everything I need to do outside of work during normal business hours builds up to consume my weekend. I know several people who work for business with half-day Fridays and that's when they get all of their outside-of-work things done ensuring that their weekends are actually free for doing the things that they want to do. If you have kids this is an even bigger deal. If you don't, you're free for whatever every evening. If you have kids, your after work time is committed until they get to sleep every night. Having that work-day time when your kids are in school becomes HUUUUUUUGE. I also know people who work for CVS doing 12 hour shifts with a limit of 80 hours over the course of two weeks. This leads to a lot of full days off every 2 week period...and they love it. It's less about the "X hour workday" and more about the "X hours of free time during regular working hours"
- alkonaut 10y agoSwedes typically do 9h days because we take long, unpaid lunches. White collar workers in cities normally do ah hour at noon -1pm. The 9h day is a bummer, but with flexible hours at least I can normally do a 2h lunch if I need to go to the dentist or sort something else out. Half days off is a brilliant idea, because it makes it easy to know when to schedule kids appointments withe doctor etc.
- mattmanser 10y agoThis sounds like you're counting the 2h toward the length of the day? I thought one generally doesn't include lunch in the day length. So an 8 hour 'day' with an hour lunch is 8-5, 8 hours working + 1 hour off-time. When they say "6 hours" in this article, they're excluding lunch.
- cmdrfred 10y agoI think it depends on the trade. I'm in the process of leaving a IT job that forces you to take a unpaid "lunch" but expects you to be available to them during that time. Its a way to cheat and fill the schedule in some cases.
- jahaja 10y agoThe common sentiment in articles like these is to try to appease to the owner; "look, the productivity!". We seem so subjugated by this state of affairs that worker happiness and health is not allowed to be an end in itself.
- leereeves 10y agoWorkers don't seem particularly eager to fight for shorter work weeks right now. "Appeasing the owner" with promises of higher productivity might be the best strategy for passing these changes.
- ctack 10y agoExactly that. Bringing it up in any other way would likely paint you as a trouble starter!
- philipov 10y agoI don't think most workers have the liberty to fight for their interests due to the double threat of being fired and not having a safety net to fall back on.
- aianus 10y agoMost tech workers could easily work fewer hours for less money in second-year cities or take months-long sabbaticals but choose to do the opposite. When given a choice between more money and more free time everyone around me chooses money and prestige.
- xxs 10y ago>>everyone around me chooses... I guess it's quite a biased (limited) view.
- dv_dt 10y agoIt's typically not an accepted proposition to offer to work 4 days for proportionally less pay (even if one does the math to fix the ratio for benefits). So it's not really a sliding scale for less time for less money, the choice is predominantly full time for more money or full time for less money. So this idea that people always choose more time and more money is a red herring.
- miltondts 10y agoAt least for software engineering we should realize that after some time(probably 3h) per day/sleep we are doing negative work. At that point we are most likely creating more problems/bugs than working code. Actually this just reminded me of the gitlab incident and many others that happened to me and coworkers. The most damaging mistakes I can remember seem to always be linked to tired people coding.
- Entalpi 10y agoWhy not do a binary search study and perform another with 7 hours instead! There must be some form of sweet spot!
- programLyrique 10y agoIt's what we've done in France since 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek Some want to make it more flexible...
- pizza 10y agoI have a strong belief that I have no proof for that our society would be more productive if wages were such that people didn't have to worry about their next paycheck or their replaceability or their hierarchical fetters of restraint from free responsibility. Seems we get stuck in local optima by being "good responsible hard-working employees"
- vivekd 10y agoIs this really proof. These nurses knew that they were the subject of a study, they knew that the hours were temporary, and they knew that if the outcome was positive they may get to work less and get paid the same for the rest of their lives. Of course they had a very strong incentive to organize more activities and be as good as possible for the trial period. If you really want a study, try finding workers in a factory who work 6 hours and then compare their productivity to workers in a different factor who work 8 hours.
- josh5555 10y agoIMO these blanked policies don't work. If they can be job specific or perhaps even individually tailored. Perhaps a 6 hour work day is great for nurses, but maybe 8 hour days with a longer weekend are better for developers, for example.
- ars 10y ago> boosted their productivity by organising 85% more activities for their patients, from nature walks to sing-a-longs That sounds like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect to me.
- devdad 10y agoI'm actually a Swedish business owner (me and co-owner) doing 30 hour weeks. One of our main goals of starting our digital consultancy was to work less but receive same or better pay. It works well for us. We're at least as productive as we were as employees. The main difference being we cut out "fika" - this was easily 60 minutes per day at our old work place - and dropped all private web lurking from the work days. We just decided we didn't need all that downtime from doing work during days, we'd rather spend it at home. Clients are pleased with the work, I get to both drop and pickup up my kids everyday. In Sweden, if you've got web dev skills, this is very doable. I believe in it on a bigger scale for worker happiness sake and really hope we'll get there soon.
- tomcam 10y agoIt's great that you cut out fika, because as we all agree, fika is... er, what, exactly?
- MagnumOpus 10y agoCoffee breaks, essentially. From the first google result: "Fika is a common practice at workplaces in Sweden and Finland where it constitutes at least one break during a normal workday. Often, two fikor are taken in a day at around 9:00 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon. The work fika is an important social event where employees can gather and socialize to discuss private and professional matters. It is not uncommon for management to join employees and to some extent it can even be considered impolite not to join one's colleagues at fika. The practice is not limited to any specific sector of the labor market and is considered normal practice even in government administration."
- devdad 10y agoThis is a good interpretation of the term. Sorry for not explaining the concept of fika :) My company is a bit weird in the Swedish work culture since we don't really go for breaks at 9.00 am and 3 pm. But we get to go home at 3-4 pm because of it. I realize that this is privileged and that the fika fills an important need for a break during more physical or mentally demanding work.
- edblarney 10y agoBecause the nature of the work was very 'hourly wage oriented' and there wasn't really room for 'productivity gains' ... what happened was: Avg. hours per worker went down - but otherwise costs remains the same. The state has to pay for 'x hours of work' to fill the demand, so why on earth did they think there would be any savings? 'Joe, you get every Friday off' 'Sue, you get to work every Friday'. ??? This might be better in a situation wherein people can simply 'get more done' in 'less time' and opt to spend less time at work.
- rocky1138 10y agoHas anyone ever studied the effect that happens when some people are faced with data supporting a given position they argue the exact opposite? It's a sort of tone deafness, I think. From TFA: "So I don't think people should start with the question of whether or not to have reduced hours. First, it should be: what can we do to make the working environment better? And maybe different things can be better for different groups. It could be to do with working hours and working times, but it could be a lot of other things as well." Well, yeah, but a comprehensive study just showed that reducing working hours gives a tremendous improvement to the quality of life and number of jobs in an area. So why shouldn't we look at it?
- awful 10y agoI worked for well over a decade in a US +100y.o. global research company, who famously kept everyone working during the depression. Famously, 8 hour work days with summer work hours reduced to roughly 7.x hours because the founder respected workers and family life. Half hour for lunch, variable depending on responsibilities, excellent on-site food, a barber shop, other amenities. Significant Christmas bonus, mostly shut down over holidays, pension later 401ks. I would arrive at home at 4pm after full day in the summer and a half hour commute - and still had until after 9:30pm to garden, home projects, before the sun set. Bottom line, things got done but Wall Street doesn't take kindly to that kind of giveaway nor freedom to employees and forced a buyout. Of course I understand noone cares what I think, but I had the greatest personal and professional recognized successes and triumphs in that very environment, freedom coupled with discipline, and I simply cannot understand people's point of view when they talk of longer hours.
- splintercell 10y agoYou can't have more money, AND fewer hours/more vacation. If the company still paid good money, then it just means that they were a really profitable enterprise. It's like if a company like Google which currently pays top dollar, decides to pay average market salary, but loads the compensation offer with perks and time off, then I bet people would be saying that Google is a profitable company because it gives employees all these perks, whereas Google gives all these benefits because it's a hugely profitable company. Some people would rather get paid more (especially if they are young) then work comfortably, maybe it's too hard for you to believe but America is full of people like that.
- CydeWeys 10y ago> You can't have more money, AND fewer hours/more vacation. This assumes that productivity is constant per hour worked, which is far from the truth for many professions. For most professions you the productivity delta not only decreases with too many hours, it even eventually becomes negative. There's no reason to suspect that eight is the optimal number of hours for every profession; it's just a historical quirk left over from the days of predominantly manual factory labor.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoWorking 6hr or 10hr isn't really the issue. It's being forced to work one or the other when that's not a good fit for the situation.
- stefs 10y agopersonal anecdote. * i'm a software developer in central europe. * i suffer from delayed sleep cycle (i.e. i'm a night owl). * i picked up weightlifting (as the main hobby) to compensate for all the sitting and the club has fixed workout times in the evening (i.e. no 24/7 gym access). the harder i work out, the more sleep i need. i used to work a 42 hour work week (from 7:30am - getting up at ~6:30am to ~6pm) at a small web dev company in the countryside for 2 years. close to the end i was practically burnt out, close to tears every evening and broke out in celebration when they told me i was fired. even after 2 years my sleep cylce hasn't normalized - i've been constantly sleep deprived. afterwards i got another software dev job at a company in the capital where i first worked 25 hours and now work 30 hours a week with flexible time - roughly 6 hours a day monday to friday, no core time (except for scheduled meetings). i get paid more for those 30 hours than for the 42 hours in the first job, but have less money at the end of the month because i used to live with my parents at the first company. there are a lot of differences (more competent superiors etc), but personal observation regarding work culture and time: * i'm usually well rested: due to flexible time i rarely set an alarm and wake up on my own depending on when i went to bed and how much i worked out (or boozed) the previous day. this means sometimes i'm in the office at 3pm. sometimes 7am. doesn't really matter as long as i don't have any meetings (which are very rare; currently once a week at 2pm). if i want to stay home for the day i send my teammates a message. * stress level is extremely low because i can always take time off without much bureaucracy if i have to attend personal matters. * due to only working 6 hours a day i can easily accumulate overtime which isn't paid but goes into an 1:1 overtime pool. this enables the next point: * i rarely sit idle. if there isn't any work to do, i'll go home. period. if there's a lot of work to do (and i'm in the zone), i'll happily stay longer. it evens out and i never idly wait for the clock, passing time. i usually work more during the winter and less during the summer, when customers are on vacation. * if i'm feeling unwell but not sick (or not sick enough for sick leave) i work from home and take frequent naps. if i'm sick it's rarely for long because coming to work sick is heavily discouraged and i just stay in bed. i go back to work as soon as i feel healthy and ready even when my doctor approved more sick leave. * if my concentration is slipping and i don't get any work done, i call it a day. if i'm super productive and in the zone i stay because i want to. * because of all those things i love working there. i think my employer is fair, understands efficiency and treats us employees well and i wouldn't want to cheat the company because "do as you'd be done by". i wouldn't call in sick if i had a hangover (or are otherwise unfit to work due to my own fault). if i work from home i don't do the dishes on company time. i'm honest - and so is my employer (as far as i can tell - i never caught them trying to cheat me). loyality is high; in case i suspect a colleague of cheating i'm actually on my employers side and tell them to quit their bullshit because of self interest (i don't want to lose those perks). * i don't think i could deliver the same bang for the buck with an 8 hour work day because i wouldn't be able to accumulate the overtime i'd need to take time off if i'm not at my best. but if i wanted more - or even less - that'd be possible. * i still earn enough to get by comfortably. * i don't have kids yet but many of my colleages do and they love working part time because it makes things so much easier and enables them to spend more time with their offspring, even though they earn less. but this way their spouses can work more and earn more, so it evens out - and they can share responsibilities easier. TL;DR: in my opinion 30h/week is the best bang for the buck for both me and my employer because i only work when i'm productive, so the company doesn't have to pay for my idle time and i can minimize stress and frustration. i understand this is partially possible due to the nature of software projects (deliver on time, but it doesn't matter much when you do the work). edit: also, i can do 6 hours without the mandatory 30 minute break, if i'm in a hurry. edit 2: i can't offload work to teammates. if i take time off, work just accumulates. no cheating!
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- wazoox 10y agoDidn't Kellog's implement 32 hours work week back in the 30s with tremendous success? Yes... 1933: http://www.alternet.org/labor/when-america-came-close-establishing-30-hour-workweek http://www.alternet.org/labor/when-america-came-close-establ...
- Gustomaximus 10y agoDid they try the 4 day week @ 7.5hrs? This seems the more obvious choice for worker happiness. Also would give more time back to both emplyee/emplyor as for the former you dont have 5 days commute and the latter for things like nursing there is less handover times and similar prep. Also I imagine if a bloc of countries did this en masse it would limit any detriment. That said I'd prefer 10hr days, which often is the case anyway, if I could get a 4 day week!
- JBlue42 10y agoI was tempted to post an Ask HN the other day titled "Are Americans F-ing Crazy?" after seeing how, after only an extremely busy month, my coworkers already seem shot and burnt out. It's an architecture firm (buildings, not software) and I'm one of the few that works only 40 hrs/wk and gets to walk out on time every day and never work on the weekends. So many people came back from the holidays sick, mainly I think because their bodies were so fried from the prior year that it finally caught up. Now, they're back on that cycle. As IT support, I get to hear it all. The father of two that told me he needs to keep a laptop checked out so he can answer questions sent at 1 am. People that were given laptops so they could work remotely, but instead just work nights and weekends. A new mother, already back into the swing of working 10-11 hr/days and maybe a little more at home when the kid's asleep. Constant work on weekends. And that's all for salary. For free work. For what? Great for the clients and the business owners but it makes no sense to me. Seems like a product of poor planning, client management, and the powers that be never saying no. I've done the client services work in a previous life, the 80-100 hr weeks. Luckily, I was paid for each and every one worked, sometimes making the more in double time than my base 40 week. Burn out and depression easily followed and made some hard choices (and took some pay cuts) to transition to something a little more doable and a bit more balanced. They live that chaos because they're taught in school or inculcated in their first jobs that that's how things are. Is it because my generation (I'm early thirties) is struggle to pay off debts (school ones, in the tens of thousands for some) while also trying to do all the things our parents did? Have a house (median price in LA - $610k) or raise a family (one kid - $250k before 18)? It just strikes me as insane sometimes that this how we set ourselves up. Maybe it's purely anecdotal based on past near decade in a major city. I'm from a rural place and life can be a bit easier, at least if you have family and friends near. Sorry for going off on a rant but I was so saddened when looking around a room that day (open office, of course) to see how terrible people looked and it made me think "Why can't we do better?"
- JBlue42 10y agoSorry for any poor spellings, grammar, or odd words. Was tired and typing quickly without proofing.