7 ms·

We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. > the 40-hour work week doesn’t work anymore Doesn’t work for who? What does “w

We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. > the 40-hour work week doesn’t work anymore Doesn’t work for who? What does “works” mean anyway? Maximizes efficiency for our employers? Why is that the question? What works for you? Why not ask what works to maximize your happiness and flourishing? What works for me is fewer working hours in the week (doesn’t matter what time of day it was that I logged them) and more time to do whatever I want, whether that's coding, walking a dog, reading or doing absolutely nothing. We went from 80 hour to 40 hour weeks 100 years ago, why is 40 to 30 such a stretch today? > During the Industrial Revolution, factories needed to be running around the clock so employees during this era frequently worked between 10-16 hour days. In the 1920s however, Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, decided to try something different: His workers would only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. That is completely ahistorical! The 8 hour day was carved out from the 16 hour day and paid for in blood by a militant labor movement over several decades, not granted magnanimously by Henry Ford. You don’t have to consult obscure labor history to find that out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zobzu 10y ago
in france there were the 35h weeks by law. result... everyone mocked the country and employers gave everyone a manager title which has no 35h restriction. good luck
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  That experiment started in February 2000, a time where telework and work from home and other policies were much less common. Automation in the past 17 years have invalidated a lot of 'work' people do as well. The idea that 40-50 is some magic number is the more ridicouls claim imo. If anything, progress, technology, and automation should naturally drive down hours needed per week. No one at my job does nearly the same amount of work we did 10-15 years ago. Our Fridays are all 'work from home' which is code for 'maybe check your email or finish up something.' Our work world is only changing. Rolling with the changes makes sense to me and 35 hour or 4 day work-weeks seem like the a rational change. We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it by pretending to be busy or working at much slower paces in fear of layoffs. Also French experiemnt only lasted until 2004, when reforms were put in to raise the maximum amount of work allowable per month. I think its disingenuous to say that it 'failed.' It had a short 4 year run almost two decades ago. The world of 2017 is very different from the world of 2000-2004.
  - minimuffins 10y ago
    > We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it That's such a great point. It's a signal that something is wrong if automating tedious work away creates more misery instead of less.
    - bmmayer1 10y ago
      Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently. Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.
      - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        If automation was creating 40-hour/week jobs with benefits, I think people would be pretty happy with it. Instead it's polarizing the labor market into underemployed service workers and overemployed professionals.
      - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
        Children working in factories losing fingers every month got paid too. I think the idea that we've now, in 2017, reached perfection in employment is ridiculous. I also think "go do farmwork if your job sucks" is dismissive and below the standards of HN discussions. There's always something worse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever complain.
        laughfactory 10y ago
        I agree. I have a job I love (after numerous jobs which sucked), but I'd still vote for less working hours/days so I could actually, you know, LIVE: spend time with family and friends, enjoy nature, have hobbies, etc. The way I see it half the week should be for work, and half for life. So we should all work Monday through Wednesday, and half a day on Thursday.
      - minimuffins 10y ago
- david-given 10y ago
  Is that 35h with lunch, or without lunch? Different countries measure it differently. e.g. I believe my contract says I have a 35h work week, but that doesn't include an hour a day for a lunch break. But I believe the US measurement does include the lunchbreak, which makes my 35h work week the same as the US 40h work week.
  - s5fs 10y ago
    State law is what determines when and how breaks are to be taken. In most states, there is no law that requires an employer to give their employee breaks, let alone pay for them. In my experience, I've had mostly unpaid break times while an hourly employee. So it's common to earn 8 hours pay working 8-5, with two 15 minute "cigarette" breaks and a 30 minute lunch break.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Typically a 35 hour workweek is 7 hour days with up to an hour of unpaid lunch.
- barnacs 10y ago
  Don't rely on laws to fix this. Simply don't sign employment contracts that don't work for you. I think a lot of the HN crowd can afford that.
  - mnsc 10y ago
    This will guarantee that a change won't happen. I think a whole lot more of the HN crowd and the greater crowd won't demand less hour when "everyone else" is doing "normal" hours, even if they might "afford" it. I think you underestimate the power of wanting to be normal. If enough special snowflake people would demand 6 hour work week that might become the new normal. But in my experience these demanding flake people seem to on the contrary be very confident that they can do 60 hr work weeks and be 10x productive so the demand is rather astronomical pay rather than fewer hours. Which is why currently the "normal" working hours instead seem to be increasing. But if you believe in free will. This is correct answer, because everybody get to choose to work 60 hrs and no laws should interfere with that. No matter how much research says that this is not a sustainable way of life.
mpweiher 10y ago
> kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. Or less. If you're over 40, cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week (and declines more the more you exceed). Up to 25 hours a week, cognitive function increases with more work. Not that increasing cognitive function is the be-all and end-all, but (a) it's certainly something to consider whether you're degrading your brain and (b) 25 hours probably also works well for other reasons and for other ends. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742
- giardini 10y ago
  But is it not also true that cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week for those _under_ 40 also? In fact, isn't it true that cognitive function declines after only 10 minutes of focussing on a single problem! My main wonder: Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only? Oh, well, I can always take solace in "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis Published: August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... and "We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses" by the same author: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of-deeply-flawed-meta-analyses-says-john-ioannidis/ http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of... and the original paper "he Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses" at: https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-redundant-misleading-conflicted-systematic-reviews-meta-analyses/ https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-r...
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    > Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only? 1st sentence of introduction of the fine paper: "Many countries have already increased their retirement ages by delaying the age at which people are eligible to start receiving pension payments."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
np422 10y ago
In some places 8 hour workday was achieved by union organized strikes, in other places by law decree and in other places by non-unionized workers and employers as an agreement. The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ... Social factors can drive technological innovation, which then makes it possible to more peaceably accommodate the social movements' demands.
- js8 10y ago
  > The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements I think that's actually also ahistorical. There are some scholars who believe that before industrial revolution, commoners only worked on average 6 hours per day.
  - crpatino 10y ago
    You are right, but that should be taken with a grain of salt. Most preindustrial work was agricultural, and therefore heavily tied to the seasonal cycles of the year. While your comment is factually correct, it conveys the wrong image to the listener. The first thing modern people with white collar lifestyles will think when they hear "average 6 hrs per day" is some sort of utopia where they go to their jobs one hour later and leave one hour earlier. The experience of those preindustrial laborers would have been closer to being employed in a sweatshop, working 70+hrs per week for 5 months; then being unemployed for the rest of the year. During those lean times, they would split their time between small DIY home improvement projects, unpaid civic duty activities, maybe working small one-off jigs for wealthier neighbours, drinking cheap ale, and in general worring about running out of food before the sweatshops open up again next year.
    - 10y ago
clarry 10y ago
> We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. How about this: we should absolutely become more flexible and let people find the workweek that works for themselves.
- vkou 10y ago
  If you can get as much shit done in 20 hours as the average employee can in 40 hours, I will assign you twice the work. No, I won't pay you twice as much. (But as a top performer, you can expect a 5% YoY pay raise, and a 15%, instead of a 12% bonus.)
  - r_smart 10y ago
    This has always been a thing that bothers me. The incentive structure is for me to be more productive than my peers rather than as productive as I can be.
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    LOL. Well put. This is totally the bullshit way things work in the US. You can work as hard as you can and still only make the same salary. Hell, most places I've worked have what amounts to a cost of living adjustment (the so called "performance review") of 2-5%, and, if you're lucky, a 3-5% bonus which is tied to company performance and paid annually. The inventive is always to find the smallest amount of work necessary to keep the job. That said, smart employers (like my current employer) focus on desired output. They don't care how much time it takes to get there, just so long as you do by the agreed upon date. So if you can achieve the objective that they're willing to pay you $X/year for in 20 hours a week, everybody's happy. Essentially they're paying on a freeform production basis. "We imagine that in a year you'll be able to get X done, and getting X done is with $Y to us." So far I find it immensely freeing and motivating. If I can work smarter then I can essentially work less, while still upholding my end of the bargain. As a society we just need to stop focusing on hours and start focusing on output. But in a babysitter culture where we indoctrinate kids with the 8-hour school day and production process, this change is slow to occur. Just imagine if, in highschool, we said "here's the list of things you need to know to graduate. We provide resources on the premises--teachers, mentors, technology, books, etc--for achieving this, and it can take as long or short as you are capable and motivated. Go!" Yes, some would take forever, but I suspect many would blow through it so they could focus on doing whatever they really valued. But this will never happen because what parents really value out of highschool is the daycare aspect. While the parents are at work they can rest easy deluding themselves that their kids are 1) relatively safe, and 2) "learning" something. Safe, perhaps, but learning? Not enough, and super inefficiently. I've been in both public school and home school, and I've seen what I could do when properly incentivized. In home school I was efficiency in motion because I wanted to finish so I could go play. In public school I barely applied myself because what point was there. I'd be there for 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, no matter what I did so... But daycare, ahem, highschool isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
To add to this, human labor doesn't begin with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to it, people produced the bulk of their own food, clothing, furniture and tools. Most manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines. Serfs may have been tied to the land, but they worked for themselves on their own schedule, not a micromanaging lord who demanded set working hours. Before mechanization and factories, textiles were made mainly in people’s homes (giving rise to the term cottage industry), with merchants often providing the raw materials and basic equipment, and then picking up the finished product. Workers set their own schedules under this system. The Industrial Revolution's effect on the working class is somewhat similar to what Chinese peasants who are forced to move out of their ancestral villages experience. Sure, the economist will tell you that real wages increased and the working classes began to have a more varied diet, as if that in total defines the overall happiness of a person. But despite the rise in income, many feel worse off..going from working outside and in a small, yet tight-knit community to being forced to live in polluted cities in cramped apartments where even though there are more people, there is more loneliness and alienation. I'm fortunate and I work remotely. Due to not having to deal with all the distractions and wastes of time that are part of the modern office, I'm able to be roughly 1.8x more productive (stats from github & RescueTime). I do the same amount of work in 20-25 hours/wk that I did in 40+hrs/wk (not even including commute times). My morale, motivation, and creativity has increased greatly. I don't have to take a vacation day to deal with doctor's appointments, picking up clothes from the cleaners, going to the DMV, or whatever else you can only do from 8-5 M-F. In short, the company I work for is getting the same, if not more productivity out of me (my code is definitely of a higher quality and I'm never burned out enough to take shortcuts.) without any cost. I don't have to commute, pay, spend less on gas, eat healthier and cheaper because I have access to my kitchen, etc. It's a win for both sides without costing either party anything beyond the risk it took on allowing a remote culture. So much of work in the modern office is pure optics. So many times after lunch I would be well served by taking a nap for an hour or two instead of wasting 2-3 hours staring blankly at a screen while I'm doing the microsleep, head bob dance.
- shostack 10y ago
  Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers? What about non-developers?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zobzu 10y ago

in france there were the 35h weeks by law. result... everyone mocked the country and employers gave everyone a manager title which has no 35h restriction. good luck

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
That experiment started in February 2000, a time where telework and work from home and other policies were much less common. Automation in the past 17 years have invalidated a lot of 'work' people do as well. The idea that 40-50 is some magic number is the more ridicouls claim imo. If anything, progress, technology, and automation should naturally drive down hours needed per week. No one at my job does nearly the same amount of work we did 10-15 years ago. Our Fridays are all 'work from home' which is code for 'maybe check your email or finish up something.' Our work world is only changing. Rolling with the changes makes sense to me and 35 hour or 4 day work-weeks seem like the a rational change. We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it by pretending to be busy or working at much slower paces in fear of layoffs. Also French experiemnt only lasted until 2004, when reforms were put in to raise the maximum amount of work allowable per month. I think its disingenuous to say that it 'failed.' It had a short 4 year run almost two decades ago. The world of 2017 is very different from the world of 2000-2004.
- minimuffins 10y ago
  > We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it That's such a great point. It's a signal that something is wrong if automating tedious work away creates more misery instead of less.
  - bmmayer1 10y ago
    Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently. Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      If automation was creating 40-hour/week jobs with benefits, I think people would be pretty happy with it. Instead it's polarizing the labor market into underemployed service workers and overemployed professionals.
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
      Children working in factories losing fingers every month got paid too. I think the idea that we've now, in 2017, reached perfection in employment is ridiculous. I also think "go do farmwork if your job sucks" is dismissive and below the standards of HN discussions. There's always something worse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever complain.
      - laughfactory 10y ago
        I agree. I have a job I love (after numerous jobs which sucked), but I'd still vote for less working hours/days so I could actually, you know, LIVE: spend time with family and friends, enjoy nature, have hobbies, etc. The way I see it half the week should be for work, and half for life. So we should all work Monday through Wednesday, and half a day on Thursday.
    - minimuffins 10y ago
david-given 10y ago
Is that 35h with lunch, or without lunch? Different countries measure it differently. e.g. I believe my contract says I have a 35h work week, but that doesn't include an hour a day for a lunch break. But I believe the US measurement does include the lunchbreak, which makes my 35h work week the same as the US 40h work week.
- s5fs 10y ago
  State law is what determines when and how breaks are to be taken. In most states, there is no law that requires an employer to give their employee breaks, let alone pay for them. In my experience, I've had mostly unpaid break times while an hourly employee. So it's common to earn 8 hours pay working 8-5, with two 15 minute "cigarette" breaks and a 30 minute lunch break.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Typically a 35 hour workweek is 7 hour days with up to an hour of unpaid lunch.
barnacs 10y ago
Don't rely on laws to fix this. Simply don't sign employment contracts that don't work for you. I think a lot of the HN crowd can afford that.
- mnsc 10y ago
  This will guarantee that a change won't happen. I think a whole lot more of the HN crowd and the greater crowd won't demand less hour when "everyone else" is doing "normal" hours, even if they might "afford" it. I think you underestimate the power of wanting to be normal. If enough special snowflake people would demand 6 hour work week that might become the new normal. But in my experience these demanding flake people seem to on the contrary be very confident that they can do 60 hr work weeks and be 10x productive so the demand is rather astronomical pay rather than fewer hours. Which is why currently the "normal" working hours instead seem to be increasing. But if you believe in free will. This is correct answer, because everybody get to choose to work 60 hrs and no laws should interfere with that. No matter how much research says that this is not a sustainable way of life.

mpweiher 10y ago

> kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. Or less. If you're over 40, cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week (and declines more the more you exceed). Up to 25 hours a week, cognitive function increases with more work. Not that increasing cognitive function is the be-all and end-all, but (a) it's certainly something to consider whether you're degrading your brain and (b) 25 hours probably also works well for other reasons and for other ends. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2737742

giardini 10y ago
But is it not also true that cognitive function declines if you work more than 25 hours a week for those _under_ 40 also? In fact, isn't it true that cognitive function declines after only 10 minutes of focussing on a single problem! My main wonder: Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only? Oh, well, I can always take solace in "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis Published: August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... and "We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses" by the same author: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of-deeply-flawed-meta-analyses-says-john-ioannidis/ http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/13/we-have-an-epidemic-of... and the original paper "he Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses" at: https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-redundant-misleading-conflicted-systematic-reviews-meta-analyses/ https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/mass-production-r...
- mpweiher 10y ago
  > Why did they limit the study to persons over 40 only? 1st sentence of introduction of the fine paper: "Many countries have already increased their retirement ages by delaying the age at which people are eligible to start receiving pension payments."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

np422 10y ago

In some places 8 hour workday was achieved by union organized strikes, in other places by law decree and in other places by non-unionized workers and employers as an agreement. The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ...

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements ... Social factors can drive technological innovation, which then makes it possible to more peaceably accommodate the social movements' demands.
js8 10y ago
> The 8 hour workday was made possible by increasing productivity, mostly due to accumulated production capital and technological improvements I think that's actually also ahistorical. There are some scholars who believe that before industrial revolution, commoners only worked on average 6 hours per day.
- crpatino 10y ago
  You are right, but that should be taken with a grain of salt. Most preindustrial work was agricultural, and therefore heavily tied to the seasonal cycles of the year. While your comment is factually correct, it conveys the wrong image to the listener. The first thing modern people with white collar lifestyles will think when they hear "average 6 hrs per day" is some sort of utopia where they go to their jobs one hour later and leave one hour earlier. The experience of those preindustrial laborers would have been closer to being employed in a sweatshop, working 70+hrs per week for 5 months; then being unemployed for the rest of the year. During those lean times, they would split their time between small DIY home improvement projects, unpaid civic duty activities, maybe working small one-off jigs for wealthier neighbours, drinking cheap ale, and in general worring about running out of food before the sweatshops open up again next year.
  - 10y ago

clarry 10y ago

> We should absolutely kill the 40 hour week and replace it with a 30 hour week. How about this: we should absolutely become more flexible and let people find the workweek that works for themselves.

vkou 10y ago
If you can get as much shit done in 20 hours as the average employee can in 40 hours, I will assign you twice the work. No, I won't pay you twice as much. (But as a top performer, you can expect a 5% YoY pay raise, and a 15%, instead of a 12% bonus.)
- r_smart 10y ago
  This has always been a thing that bothers me. The incentive structure is for me to be more productive than my peers rather than as productive as I can be.
- laughfactory 10y ago
  LOL. Well put. This is totally the bullshit way things work in the US. You can work as hard as you can and still only make the same salary. Hell, most places I've worked have what amounts to a cost of living adjustment (the so called "performance review") of 2-5%, and, if you're lucky, a 3-5% bonus which is tied to company performance and paid annually. The inventive is always to find the smallest amount of work necessary to keep the job. That said, smart employers (like my current employer) focus on desired output. They don't care how much time it takes to get there, just so long as you do by the agreed upon date. So if you can achieve the objective that they're willing to pay you $X/year for in 20 hours a week, everybody's happy. Essentially they're paying on a freeform production basis. "We imagine that in a year you'll be able to get X done, and getting X done is with $Y to us." So far I find it immensely freeing and motivating. If I can work smarter then I can essentially work less, while still upholding my end of the bargain. As a society we just need to stop focusing on hours and start focusing on output. But in a babysitter culture where we indoctrinate kids with the 8-hour school day and production process, this change is slow to occur. Just imagine if, in highschool, we said "here's the list of things you need to know to graduate. We provide resources on the premises--teachers, mentors, technology, books, etc--for achieving this, and it can take as long or short as you are capable and motivated. Go!" Yes, some would take forever, but I suspect many would blow through it so they could focus on doing whatever they really valued. But this will never happen because what parents really value out of highschool is the daycare aspect. While the parents are at work they can rest easy deluding themselves that their kids are 1) relatively safe, and 2) "learning" something. Safe, perhaps, but learning? Not enough, and super inefficiently. I've been in both public school and home school, and I've seen what I could do when properly incentivized. In home school I was efficiency in motion because I wanted to finish so I could go play. In public school I barely applied myself because what point was there. I'd be there for 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, no matter what I did so... But daycare, ahem, highschool isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago

To add to this, human labor doesn't begin with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to it, people produced the bulk of their own food, clothing, furniture and tools. Most manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines. Serfs may have been tied to the land, but they worked for themselves on their own schedule, not a micromanaging lord who demanded set working hours. Before mechanization and factories, textiles were made mainly in people’s homes (giving rise to the term cottage industry), with merchants often providing the raw materials and basic equipment, and then picking up the finished product. Workers set their own schedules under this system. The Industrial Revolution's effect on the working class is somewhat similar to what Chinese peasants who are forced to move out of their ancestral villages experience. Sure, the economist will tell you that real wages increased and the working classes began to have a more varied diet, as if that in total defines the overall happiness of a person. But despite the rise in income, many feel worse off..going from working outside and in a small, yet tight-knit community to being forced to live in polluted cities in cramped apartments where even though there are more people, there is more loneliness and alienation. I'm fortunate and I work remotely. Due to not having to deal with all the distractions and wastes of time that are part of the modern office, I'm able to be roughly 1.8x more productive (stats from github & RescueTime). I do the same amount of work in 20-25 hours/wk that I did in 40+hrs/wk (not even including commute times). My morale, motivation, and creativity has increased greatly. I don't have to take a vacation day to deal with doctor's appointments, picking up clothes from the cleaners, going to the DMV, or whatever else you can only do from 8-5 M-F. In short, the company I work for is getting the same, if not more productivity out of me (my code is definitely of a higher quality and I'm never burned out enough to take shortcuts.) without any cost. I don't have to commute, pay, spend less on gas, eat healthier and cheaper because I have access to my kitchen, etc. It's a win for both sides without costing either party anything beyond the risk it took on allowing a remote culture. So much of work in the modern office is pure optics. So many times after lunch I would be well served by taking a nap for an hour or two instead of wasting 2-3 hours staring blankly at a screen while I'm doing the microsleep, head bob dance.

shostack 10y ago
Do you feel this dynamic holds true for all developers? What about non-developers?