4 ms·

> Give yourself one day with no work If killing the 40-hour work week means I'm now working six days a week instead of five, then long live the 40-hour work we

by pcmonk 10y ago

> Give yourself one day with no work If killing the 40-hour work week means I'm now working six days a week instead of five, then long live the 40-hour work week. Some people (myself included) need two days per week off work, except in special circumstances. We also need to be able to clock out of work and not feel bad about doing so just because we still have work. The worst thing about university to me was the feeling of always having more work to do. I understand avoiding the "I'm just working until the clock hand turns a little further" state, but often the cumulative effects of the proposed alternative are worse.

helthanatos 10y ago
What about a 40 hour week working just 4 days?
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  What about not working so much? You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours, plenty of which you spend blocked anyway, but for whatever reason no one will pay you $100k/year for 20 hours.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    Part time work, in my experience, is never paid out on a linear scale. The exception is when you're working for yourself as a consultant. However, with consulting, for every billable hour, there's typically another unbillable hour of work which still needs to be done.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Do you still want full health insurance benefits, a full laptop, and a full vacation policy? I think the breakeven for a 200k full time employee would be maybe 80-85k for a 20h a week. Which is still enough to get by in many places. Why do employers not want this? I can think of a few reason. Knowledge transfer is hard. Adding workers to a project always makes it slow down by a fair bit (as in less than linear scaling). So a project that has 1 40h person right now. How many 20h employees would it take to replace him? 3? 4? 5? Perhaps 5 20h employees could do a programming project to the level of 1 dedicated 40h employee. Which then means the actual "equal" pay for your 20h employee is more like 35k per year, not the 85k mentioned above.
    - pc86 10y ago
      Why in the world would it take 5 people to do the same thing as 1 when they're working half the time? First, you're assuming that it's not possible to do 50% of the work in 50% of the time. If you look at the people on HN working full-time (e.g. not founding a start-up or doing their own thing but working a regular W2 gig), they could probably complete 60-70% of the work they do in 40 hours in 20, especially if they got to choose what 20 hours they're working, and especially if they're paid break-even like you said, somewhere in the 80k range. Which, before we start hearing from the SF people about they pay $25k/mo for a studio, is many tens of thousands above the average US household income and nearly three times the average US individual income. And for the project, if you've got two people doing that, let's say 60% of the velocity of their 40-hour selves, you're essentially getting the work product of 1.2 people for the price of 1, from 2 separate people. All while having happier, more loyal employees to boot. I'd absolutely work 20 hours a week if I could get paid 40-45% of my current salary and if I didn't think it'd kill my career prospects at my current company. Even places that would entertain the idea of part-time engineers, I don't think they'd be promoting any of them to manager or director.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        I think you missed something. There is a HUGE communication overhead in writing code with multiple developers. HUGE. If you have Bob writing a program all by himself, he writes at speed X. Now you add Jim. Jim is just as smart as Bob. But he doesn't know the way the object model works. He doesn't know about the glitch where sending null to some method causes a really weird stacktrace that is hard to debug. He doesn't know that the reason Bob did something else was to cover a real but rare network event. So Jim makes mistakes. Jim and Bob have to discuss decisions. Jim and Bob need to have meetings, and design reviews, and repeat mistakes. So I bet the total code delivered by Bob + Jim is something in the range of .9X to 1.1X. NOWHERE near 2x like linear scaling would deliver. You can argue something like the total code quality improves with more eyes, fine. But Bob is held back a lot and able to write a lot less code because of the newly added teammate. This is why some of the most influential pieces of software ever written were done by 1 man teams. A decent 1 man can be much much more efficient than a 2 man team. So back to your example. Bob goes halftime, and you are right - his productivity drops from X to .6X (not a full 50% loss, because his brain is more rested). But adding in Jim, you don't get .6X + .6X.. you get more like .5x-.7X total productivity. Adding a third Billy, and you end up with maybe .8X the original Bob speed. Remember you now have 4 people. So you need 4 way meetings. Each person picks different parts of the codebase to specialize in. People now write code that will conflict with other people, maybe not even knowing it for months. Maybe a forth programmer Jen can get your total productivity back to the original X of just Bob. So you know took 4 half time employees to replace 1 full time employee. All of this is why I think a team of 2 is almost always a mistake. A team of 1 can go pretty far, and when it hits a wall - it may be time for a team of 3 or 4. Team of 2 has all the downsides of a team (communication overhead, etc), with not enough bodies to rocket the project.
  - andrewSC 10y ago
    > You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours I'm going to assume this is including any stock options and other benefits? Because IIRC the software engineering profession caps out at around $200k... and that's only for the best of the best in places like SV. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to be honestly haha.
    - mercutio2 10y ago
      BigCo pay for a senior software developer in the Bay Area: $160-200k base salary $10-50k cash bonus $20-200k annual RSU vesting (heavily dependent on the company, how many years you've been earning stock awards, and whether you're considered a high performer) So, you do have to be good enough to be considered a senior developer, but I'd say if you get hired as a junior developer and work hard for many years, you top out at more like $400k/year total comp. There's a reason people continue to work at BigCos, and stay in the Bay Area despite the (modestly, by these income scales) higher cost of living.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Productivity is nonlinear in hours worked. First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some obscure part of stochastic programming. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful for the company. The first 20 hours are worth $0, not $100k. If I spend an additional 10 hours/week improving my skills, that effect is multiplicative rather than additive. Claudia Goldin has a great paper on this effect, focused on using this phenomenon to explain gender gaps in pay. (Specifically, the fields with the lowest gender gaps are the most linear fields, e.g. Pharmacists.) http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103 http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...
    - gjm11 10y ago
      Suppose two of your weeks go like this: Week 1: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of stochastic programming. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company. Week 2: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of partial differential equations. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company. If you are only working 40 hours rather than 80 in those two weeks and you choose to do the first half of each week then, sure, your net value to the company will be $0. So don't do that. Pick one of those two 40-hour chunks and do it in two weeks instead of one. And, boom, your value to the company has scaled linearly. Now, no doubt your work on stochastic programming and PDEs has prepared you for some other future work of still greater value. So there's nonlinearity on longer timescales. But we can get an estimate of just how much nonlinearity there is there by looking at how your salary increases over time. Maybe you're worth 20% more each year than the year before. (That would be bigger pay rises than most people get after the first few years of working.) In that case, the first half of a given year is worth about 47.7% of what the whole year would be worth instead of 50%. So, if your work's value is nonlinear enough to justify giving you a 20% pay increase every year, then it's nonlinear enough to justify paying you about 5% less pro rata. (Plus, of course, giving you only about half as much pay increase per year.) That assumes that the growth in your value to your employer comes only from this nonlinearity in your work. If some of it is because of other things that you're learning in other ways, then the reductions should be less.
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    This is another odd byproduct of labor law in the US. The same regulations which protect workers from a lot of abusive employer behavior also have the effect of putting a floor on the numbers of hours employers require. So until regulation is reworked to protect workers irregardless of the number of hours worked this behavior will continue. It also has to do with tax incentives. Anyway, I'm totally with you. I'd voluntarily and enthusiastically take a job paying half of what I make if they expected half as much output or hours worked.
- pcmonk 10y ago
  As much as this seems great on its face, I find for myself that I can't consistently work 10 hours in a day without my productivity dropping off. Sometimes, when I'm making good progress, I'll go 10 to 12 hours, but that's not the norm. When I was in the SF startup scene, I was very fortunate to work in a company where everyone trusted everyone to work with whatever schedule allowed them to maximize productivity. It turned out that 8x5 worked pretty well for me (sometimes with an hour or two nap in the middle, though I don't do that anymore). In the beginning, I worked more hours per week, but that just resulted in me needing to fall back on the lack of vacation policy to take frequent 1-2 week vacations (adding up to maybe 6 weeks per year). When I normalized my regular schedule to 8x5, I stopped needing to do that (although I still place great value on vacation time). Many of my coworkers had rather different schedules, including one who seemed to be able to work very long hours about 6.5 days a week without much apparent drop-off in productivity.
- athenot 10y ago
  Some healthcare professionals do that. 4x10h or some similar flavor. But again the same problem hold if you have children. Assuming a very short 30m commute and lunch on the go, you are still gone 11h a day. More realistically, that's 12h/day. Smaller children that wake up at 7 will be in bed around 7:30, so the only time you're with them is during feeding/bath and that's it. You can make up for it the remainder 3 days of the week, but if your 4 work days are contiguous, that's a long time to be essentially absent as a parent.
- douche 10y ago
  Working four tens is the best, if you can swing it. Even better if you can get a schedule where you alternate Fridays and Mondays so that you get four-day weekends half the time. Especially if you commute any significant distance. Skipping one commute a week is a big win.
- laughfactory 10y ago
  Or 28 hours... 24 hours between Monday and Wednesday, 4 on Thursday. Conceptually it's half the week. I hate explaining (or trying to explain) to our five year old daughter why Daddy goes to work most days of the week. Clearly the implication is that work is higher priority than family, and everything else in life. Yes, an income is high priority, but to the exclusion of so much? Seems idiotic to me.
falcolas 10y ago
I agree. This seems optimized for workaholics; people who work as their primary goal in life. If work is not the first priority in your life, being replaced by kids, gaming, hiking (or you simply don't enjoy your day job; not everybody does), then you need a bit more structure around maximums every day, with time off to live your life. 5x8 works well for creating culturally acceptable maximums.
- omouse 10y ago
  There's a difference; if you own your own business or are freelancing, any extra work you do is for your benefit. If you're in someone else's company, completely different story.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > any extra work you do is for your benefit. Well, technically, yes. It's all still part of the process of getting paid, or drumming up business, and thus still (IMO) required work.
ksk 10y ago
You haven't explained why having a lot of work is bad.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good.
  - ksk 10y ago
    >You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good. Because it means there is an opportunity to make progress. However, if you overwork yourself, stress yourself, or are simply incapable of putting in the work necessary to make that progress happen, then you would have squandered that opportunity.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      That's a reason why work itself might be good. That's not a reason why a lot of work, to the point where you are doing more work than anything else in your life, is good.
      - ksk 10y ago
        Yeah, that is one way to look at it, and I honestly wasn't thinking of that. I was intending it to mean "a lot of courses" as the context was that of an university, but it could also mean "a large project" along the same thought axis.
    - dvtv75 10y ago
      Work doesn't always imply progress. Ask anybody who stacks shelves or waits tables for a living, or someone who works two or three jobs.
      - ksk 10y ago
        Thanks for the comment, but we were discussing work in a specific context. Instead of being so uncharitable, you could have asked what is being discussed.

by pcmonk 10y ago

helthanatos 10y ago

What about a 40 hour week working just 4 days?

MiddleEndian 10y ago
What about not working so much? You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours, plenty of which you spend blocked anyway, but for whatever reason no one will pay you $100k/year for 20 hours.
- falcolas 10y ago
  Part time work, in my experience, is never paid out on a linear scale. The exception is when you're working for yourself as a consultant. However, with consulting, for every billable hour, there's typically another unbillable hour of work which still needs to be done.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Do you still want full health insurance benefits, a full laptop, and a full vacation policy? I think the breakeven for a 200k full time employee would be maybe 80-85k for a 20h a week. Which is still enough to get by in many places. Why do employers not want this? I can think of a few reason. Knowledge transfer is hard. Adding workers to a project always makes it slow down by a fair bit (as in less than linear scaling). So a project that has 1 40h person right now. How many 20h employees would it take to replace him? 3? 4? 5? Perhaps 5 20h employees could do a programming project to the level of 1 dedicated 40h employee. Which then means the actual "equal" pay for your 20h employee is more like 35k per year, not the 85k mentioned above.
  - pc86 10y ago
    Why in the world would it take 5 people to do the same thing as 1 when they're working half the time? First, you're assuming that it's not possible to do 50% of the work in 50% of the time. If you look at the people on HN working full-time (e.g. not founding a start-up or doing their own thing but working a regular W2 gig), they could probably complete 60-70% of the work they do in 40 hours in 20, especially if they got to choose what 20 hours they're working, and especially if they're paid break-even like you said, somewhere in the 80k range. Which, before we start hearing from the SF people about they pay $25k/mo for a studio, is many tens of thousands above the average US household income and nearly three times the average US individual income. And for the project, if you've got two people doing that, let's say 60% of the velocity of their 40-hour selves, you're essentially getting the work product of 1.2 people for the price of 1, from 2 separate people. All while having happier, more loyal employees to boot. I'd absolutely work 20 hours a week if I could get paid 40-45% of my current salary and if I didn't think it'd kill my career prospects at my current company. Even places that would entertain the idea of part-time engineers, I don't think they'd be promoting any of them to manager or director.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      I think you missed something. There is a HUGE communication overhead in writing code with multiple developers. HUGE. If you have Bob writing a program all by himself, he writes at speed X. Now you add Jim. Jim is just as smart as Bob. But he doesn't know the way the object model works. He doesn't know about the glitch where sending null to some method causes a really weird stacktrace that is hard to debug. He doesn't know that the reason Bob did something else was to cover a real but rare network event. So Jim makes mistakes. Jim and Bob have to discuss decisions. Jim and Bob need to have meetings, and design reviews, and repeat mistakes. So I bet the total code delivered by Bob + Jim is something in the range of .9X to 1.1X. NOWHERE near 2x like linear scaling would deliver. You can argue something like the total code quality improves with more eyes, fine. But Bob is held back a lot and able to write a lot less code because of the newly added teammate. This is why some of the most influential pieces of software ever written were done by 1 man teams. A decent 1 man can be much much more efficient than a 2 man team. So back to your example. Bob goes halftime, and you are right - his productivity drops from X to .6X (not a full 50% loss, because his brain is more rested). But adding in Jim, you don't get .6X + .6X.. you get more like .5x-.7X total productivity. Adding a third Billy, and you end up with maybe .8X the original Bob speed. Remember you now have 4 people. So you need 4 way meetings. Each person picks different parts of the codebase to specialize in. People now write code that will conflict with other people, maybe not even knowing it for months. Maybe a forth programmer Jen can get your total productivity back to the original X of just Bob. So you know took 4 half time employees to replace 1 full time employee. All of this is why I think a team of 2 is almost always a mistake. A team of 1 can go pretty far, and when it hits a wall - it may be time for a team of 3 or 4. Team of 2 has all the downsides of a team (communication overhead, etc), with not enough bodies to rocket the project.
- andrewSC 10y ago
  > You can get a programming job that pays you $200k/year for 40 hours I'm going to assume this is including any stock options and other benefits? Because IIRC the software engineering profession caps out at around $200k... and that's only for the best of the best in places like SV. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to be honestly haha.
  - mercutio2 10y ago
    BigCo pay for a senior software developer in the Bay Area: $160-200k base salary $10-50k cash bonus $20-200k annual RSU vesting (heavily dependent on the company, how many years you've been earning stock awards, and whether you're considered a high performer) So, you do have to be good enough to be considered a senior developer, but I'd say if you get hired as a junior developer and work hard for many years, you top out at more like $400k/year total comp. There's a reason people continue to work at BigCos, and stay in the Bay Area despite the (modestly, by these income scales) higher cost of living.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Productivity is nonlinear in hours worked. First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some obscure part of stochastic programming. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful for the company. The first 20 hours are worth $0, not $100k. If I spend an additional 10 hours/week improving my skills, that effect is multiplicative rather than additive. Claudia Goldin has a great paper on this effect, focused on using this phenomenon to explain gender gaps in pay. (Specifically, the fields with the lowest gender gaps are the most linear fields, e.g. Pharmacists.) http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103 http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...
  - gjm11 10y ago
    Suppose two of your weeks go like this: Week 1: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of stochastic programming. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company. Week 2: First 20 hours: read a bunch of math papers about some arcane aspect of partial differential equations. Second 20 hours: figure out how to apply it to problems useful to the company. If you are only working 40 hours rather than 80 in those two weeks and you choose to do the first half of each week then, sure, your net value to the company will be $0. So don't do that. Pick one of those two 40-hour chunks and do it in two weeks instead of one. And, boom, your value to the company has scaled linearly. Now, no doubt your work on stochastic programming and PDEs has prepared you for some other future work of still greater value. So there's nonlinearity on longer timescales. But we can get an estimate of just how much nonlinearity there is there by looking at how your salary increases over time. Maybe you're worth 20% more each year than the year before. (That would be bigger pay rises than most people get after the first few years of working.) In that case, the first half of a given year is worth about 47.7% of what the whole year would be worth instead of 50%. So, if your work's value is nonlinear enough to justify giving you a 20% pay increase every year, then it's nonlinear enough to justify paying you about 5% less pro rata. (Plus, of course, giving you only about half as much pay increase per year.) That assumes that the growth in your value to your employer comes only from this nonlinearity in your work. If some of it is because of other things that you're learning in other ways, then the reductions should be less.
- laughfactory 10y ago
  This is another odd byproduct of labor law in the US. The same regulations which protect workers from a lot of abusive employer behavior also have the effect of putting a floor on the numbers of hours employers require. So until regulation is reworked to protect workers irregardless of the number of hours worked this behavior will continue. It also has to do with tax incentives. Anyway, I'm totally with you. I'd voluntarily and enthusiastically take a job paying half of what I make if they expected half as much output or hours worked.
pcmonk 10y ago
As much as this seems great on its face, I find for myself that I can't consistently work 10 hours in a day without my productivity dropping off. Sometimes, when I'm making good progress, I'll go 10 to 12 hours, but that's not the norm. When I was in the SF startup scene, I was very fortunate to work in a company where everyone trusted everyone to work with whatever schedule allowed them to maximize productivity. It turned out that 8x5 worked pretty well for me (sometimes with an hour or two nap in the middle, though I don't do that anymore). In the beginning, I worked more hours per week, but that just resulted in me needing to fall back on the lack of vacation policy to take frequent 1-2 week vacations (adding up to maybe 6 weeks per year). When I normalized my regular schedule to 8x5, I stopped needing to do that (although I still place great value on vacation time). Many of my coworkers had rather different schedules, including one who seemed to be able to work very long hours about 6.5 days a week without much apparent drop-off in productivity.
athenot 10y ago
Some healthcare professionals do that. 4x10h or some similar flavor. But again the same problem hold if you have children. Assuming a very short 30m commute and lunch on the go, you are still gone 11h a day. More realistically, that's 12h/day. Smaller children that wake up at 7 will be in bed around 7:30, so the only time you're with them is during feeding/bath and that's it. You can make up for it the remainder 3 days of the week, but if your 4 work days are contiguous, that's a long time to be essentially absent as a parent.
douche 10y ago
Working four tens is the best, if you can swing it. Even better if you can get a schedule where you alternate Fridays and Mondays so that you get four-day weekends half the time. Especially if you commute any significant distance. Skipping one commute a week is a big win.
laughfactory 10y ago
Or 28 hours... 24 hours between Monday and Wednesday, 4 on Thursday. Conceptually it's half the week. I hate explaining (or trying to explain) to our five year old daughter why Daddy goes to work most days of the week. Clearly the implication is that work is higher priority than family, and everything else in life. Yes, an income is high priority, but to the exclusion of so much? Seems idiotic to me.

falcolas 10y ago

I agree. This seems optimized for workaholics; people who work as their primary goal in life. If work is not the first priority in your life, being replaced by kids, gaming, hiking (or you simply don't enjoy your day job; not everybody does), then you need a bit more structure around maximums every day, with time off to live your life. 5x8 works well for creating culturally acceptable maximums.

omouse 10y ago
There's a difference; if you own your own business or are freelancing, any extra work you do is for your benefit. If you're in someone else's company, completely different story.
- falcolas 10y ago
  > any extra work you do is for your benefit. Well, technically, yes. It's all still part of the process of getting paid, or drumming up business, and thus still (IMO) required work.

ksk 10y ago

You haven't explained why having a lot of work is bad.

st3v3r 10y ago
You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good.
- ksk 10y ago
  >You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good. Because it means there is an opportunity to make progress. However, if you overwork yourself, stress yourself, or are simply incapable of putting in the work necessary to make that progress happen, then you would have squandered that opportunity.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    That's a reason why work itself might be good. That's not a reason why a lot of work, to the point where you are doing more work than anything else in your life, is good.
    - ksk 10y ago
      Yeah, that is one way to look at it, and I honestly wasn't thinking of that. I was intending it to mean "a lot of courses" as the context was that of an university, but it could also mean "a large project" along the same thought axis.
  - dvtv75 10y ago
    Work doesn't always imply progress. Ask anybody who stacks shelves or waits tables for a living, or someone who works two or three jobs.
    - ksk 10y ago
      Thanks for the comment, but we were discussing work in a specific context. Instead of being so uncharitable, you could have asked what is being discussed.