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I don't see any supporting evidence in this article which suggests that people working 15 hours are happier than those working say 35 hours. It's also hard for

I don't see any supporting evidence in this article which suggests that people working 15 hours are happier than those working say 35 hours. It's also hard for me to imagine that 15 hours is enough to sustain a level of productive output requiring intellectual work and extensive knowledge of a subject matter - unused skills rust and 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it. > A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37 per cent think they have a job that doesn’t even need to exist. I'm not going to deliberate on the prevalence of bullshit jobs and their impact on quality of life (which seems to be where the article takes it's main pitch), but given that - I rather disagree that not working is the solution that obviously follows.

AndrewDucker 10y ago
Yeah. There are lots of useful things people could be doing, and largely I think that doing productive things is good for people.
cujo 10y ago
I get the feeling that 15 hours is a ballpark number and there are certain occupations that do require more time "in the seat" to make good progress. It's probably also true that if you're putting in only ~15 hours of productivity, you're probably going to dedicate some extra time to learning new things, advancing skills, etc. My experience tells me that, as a developer, an awful lot of what I do could definitely fit in that 15 hour window if there are 2 other people also doing "my" job. Splitting up my week's tasks with the 3 of us putting in 45 hours would result in much more productivity, in my opinion. I'd then have much more time to do things I wanted to do, and experiment with new tech for shits and giggles. That often gets pushed back in favor of other life experiences these days.
aninhumer 10y ago
>unused skills rust and 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill Eh I think skills are stickier than that. FWIW, I spent about 6 months doing almost no programming, but I didn't feel particularly unproductive when I started again. Besides which, there's no reason people can't be continuing developing their skills in the remaining hours anyway. The 15 hours is just how much time you have to spend doing what you're told. And you can likely learn much more efficiently if you work with that intent instead of acquiring skills incidentally as your job requires.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  Exactly, when it frees up time you can be productive doing your own things. Having 2 days off a week, really is only enough time to do chores, not enough to spend on your own skills or do anything productive for yourself. As a contractor, I tend to take 1-3 months off between contracts + it seems to help, not hinder. I'm much fresher when I go into the next contract.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Of course, that's their right, but whether you can make a sustainable economy out of subsidizing that is another question...a question that is much more pressing than "wouldn't that be better?" and one the article doesn't even attempt to answer, probably because it is largely impossible and anything like it is speculation akin to religion.
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      > For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Also is "more Counter-Strike" at all correlated with a quality of life increase? 45 free minutes you wouldn't have had to get rid of some stress shooting things - probably yes? 5 hours a day - probably not?
    - thehardsphere 10y ago
      > For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Or worse, shooting heroin.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Or even worse, building open source software, attending city hall meetings, or parenting.
        thehardsphere 10y ago
aaron-lebo 10y ago
He's literally selling a book called UTOPIA. There's a reason he cites a survey as one of his main pieces of evidence - he doesn't have any. It's pie in the sky feel good that doesn't have any evidence. You don't start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week when the current baseline is 40 hours and a lack of decent health insurance.
- markvdb 10y ago
  To be fair, he seems to be speaking about the socially developed part of the western world. Fairly decent to very good quality universal healthcare is available in large parts of western Europe, Japan, Canada... Even large parts of eastern Europe have (the remains of) somewhat decent universal healthcare thanks to their socialist past. It's fairly clear that there isn't even support in the current US ruling class for universal healthcare. That makes anything even remotely like basic income largely irrelevant there.
dahart 10y ago
> 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it I've been programming professionally, and developing my skills at a medium pace for a couple of decades. After a few years now of actually tracking my time to the minute, I often get less than 15 hours of programming in a 40 hour work week. Meetings, chat & email, lunches & breaks, and sooner or later some degree of management, these things add up to a majority of your time. If you filled a 15 hour work week with meetings and included a lunch hour, then yeah, there's no coding getting done. But I would hope spending less time working means and implies to a greater degree shedding all the time we spend at work not working.
- valuearb 10y ago
  As much as i hate to say it, meetings and planning matter. blindly programming isn't work.
  - gregmac 10y ago
    The key is having productive meetings. If a meeting ends with no action items (assigned to specific people) and no decisions made, it was a useless meeting, and you should stop having it. Status updates can be written down and emailed, or better, posted to a wiki.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Does it scale like that though? If you do 15 hours of work over a 40 hour week, do you still do 15 hours of work over a 15 hour week, or do people end up doing 5 hours of work? Is there any evidence either way? These discussions always bring out the anecdotes, but we need hard stats to show whether this is even doable.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    I have worked in at least one organization where the meetings were likely there to prevent work from being done too quickly with an activity that still counted as billable hours. Just before I left, the "daily stand-up" included the entire development team and testing team, and lasted a minimum of 45 minutes. That was nearly 20 people, packed into one office, justifying their existence on a daily basis. So some people would actually dedicate that 15 hours to getting things done, and some people would still fill it up with bullshit and game the management metrics to maximize pay per unit of effort.
karmajunkie 10y ago
Anecdata, but I'm MUCH happier when working 15 instead of 35 and certainly 40-50 hours a week, provided I'm making the same money (or more to the point, keeping the same'ish lifestyle, albeit with more free time.) That doesn't mean I'm unoccupied an additional 20 hours a week, but being occupied with my choice of activities is way better.
- glenneroo 10y ago
  Contributing my own anecdata: I'm in a similar situation - I voluntarily started working 20 hours/week for the last 9 years. In my spare time I've taken up multiple new hobbies and cultivated older hobbies into semi-part-time jobs (a few hours a month). I can't ever imagine the torture of working 40+ hours/week ever again.
karmajunkie 10y ago
Anecdata, but I'm MUCH happier when working 15 instead of 35 and certainly 40-50 hours a week, provided I'm making the same money (or more to the point, keeping the same'ish lifestyle, albeit with more free time.) That doesn't mean I'm unoccupied an additional 20 hours a week, but being occupied with my choice of activities is way better.
alexc05 10y ago
So a few years ago I read Tim Ferriss' "the four hour work week" - and while I will not go on a screed about the part that I find ridiculous, I do think the chapter (and recurring thread) about "what do you do with when you work 4 hours a week" is entirely relevant here. The summary / thesis of life-after-work is that we must "find a muse" - which is to say, since you no longer must work your entire life away, you may now re-allocate those same hours doing something that you love. Even something that you are wildly, obsessively, passionate about. A small portion of the current policy research around AI & Automation is how do we deal with the emotional fallout among people who feel they've lost their purpose. How do we convince people that it is OK to "take a handout"? There are really deep cultural implications to that idea. There are people who believe "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - consider the Georgia representative who very specifically floated the idea of making poor children sweep floors in schools in exchange for meals "in order to teach them the important life lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch" http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-clean-schools-in-exchange-for-lunch http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-... ... like that is someone who really believes in that as a principle as opposed to just a colloquialism. What would it do to their self esteem if they were suddenly taking free money? How many parents would be happy to spend an extra hour with their kids in the morning? A couple of extra hours at night? A few extra hours to learn guitar or beat that next level of super-mario?
- Taylor_OD 10y ago
  I've move from a company where I had to be there 9-5:30+ to a company with flex hours. Earlier in the week I leave around 3-4 somewhat regularly because on other days I have to be at work until 8:30+. Even with a couple extra hours at home a week it's hard to find exactly what I should be doing. I tried to put together a schedule of taking some online classes I've watched to for a while, writing, spending 30-1 hour playing games I've been meaning to play, and generally calling / talking to friends and family more. However I still find myself in a loop of checking reddit, youtube, facebook, and hackernews over and over around 7PM. I understand its a problem born from extreme privilege but if the future is filled with more free time it's a problem that many will run into.

AndrewDucker 10y ago

Yeah. There are lots of useful things people could be doing, and largely I think that doing productive things is good for people.

cujo 10y ago

I get the feeling that 15 hours is a ballpark number and there are certain occupations that do require more time "in the seat" to make good progress. It's probably also true that if you're putting in only ~15 hours of productivity, you're probably going to dedicate some extra time to learning new things, advancing skills, etc. My experience tells me that, as a developer, an awful lot of what I do could definitely fit in that 15 hour window if there are 2 other people also doing "my" job. Splitting up my week's tasks with the 3 of us putting in 45 hours would result in much more productivity, in my opinion. I'd then have much more time to do things I wanted to do, and experiment with new tech for shits and giggles. That often gets pushed back in favor of other life experiences these days.

aninhumer 10y ago

>unused skills rust and 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill Eh I think skills are stickier than that. FWIW, I spent about 6 months doing almost no programming, but I didn't feel particularly unproductive when I started again. Besides which, there's no reason people can't be continuing developing their skills in the remaining hours anyway. The 15 hours is just how much time you have to spend doing what you're told. And you can likely learn much more efficiently if you work with that intent instead of acquiring skills incidentally as your job requires.

stuaxo 10y ago
Exactly, when it frees up time you can be productive doing your own things. Having 2 days off a week, really is only enough time to do chores, not enough to spend on your own skills or do anything productive for yourself. As a contractor, I tend to take 1-3 months off between contracts + it seems to help, not hinder. I'm much fresher when I go into the next contract.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Of course, that's their right, but whether you can make a sustainable economy out of subsidizing that is another question...a question that is much more pressing than "wouldn't that be better?" and one the article doesn't even attempt to answer, probably because it is largely impossible and anything like it is speculation akin to religion.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Also is "more Counter-Strike" at all correlated with a quality of life increase? 45 free minutes you wouldn't have had to get rid of some stress shooting things - probably yes? 5 hours a day - probably not?
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    > For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike. Or worse, shooting heroin.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Or even worse, building open source software, attending city hall meetings, or parenting.
      - thehardsphere 10y ago

aaron-lebo 10y ago

He's literally selling a book called UTOPIA. There's a reason he cites a survey as one of his main pieces of evidence - he doesn't have any. It's pie in the sky feel good that doesn't have any evidence. You don't start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week when the current baseline is 40 hours and a lack of decent health insurance.

markvdb 10y ago
To be fair, he seems to be speaking about the socially developed part of the western world. Fairly decent to very good quality universal healthcare is available in large parts of western Europe, Japan, Canada... Even large parts of eastern Europe have (the remains of) somewhat decent universal healthcare thanks to their socialist past. It's fairly clear that there isn't even support in the current US ruling class for universal healthcare. That makes anything even remotely like basic income largely irrelevant there.

dahart 10y ago

> 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it I've been programming professionally, and developing my skills at a medium pace for a couple of decades. After a few years now of actually tracking my time to the minute, I often get less than 15 hours of programming in a 40 hour work week. Meetings, chat & email, lunches & breaks, and sooner or later some degree of management, these things add up to a majority of your time. If you filled a 15 hour work week with meetings and included a lunch hour, then yeah, there's no coding getting done. But I would hope spending less time working means and implies to a greater degree shedding all the time we spend at work not working.

valuearb 10y ago
As much as i hate to say it, meetings and planning matter. blindly programming isn't work.
- gregmac 10y ago
  The key is having productive meetings. If a meeting ends with no action items (assigned to specific people) and no decisions made, it was a useless meeting, and you should stop having it. Status updates can be written down and emailed, or better, posted to a wiki.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Does it scale like that though? If you do 15 hours of work over a 40 hour week, do you still do 15 hours of work over a 15 hour week, or do people end up doing 5 hours of work? Is there any evidence either way? These discussions always bring out the anecdotes, but we need hard stats to show whether this is even doable.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I have worked in at least one organization where the meetings were likely there to prevent work from being done too quickly with an activity that still counted as billable hours. Just before I left, the "daily stand-up" included the entire development team and testing team, and lasted a minimum of 45 minutes. That was nearly 20 people, packed into one office, justifying their existence on a daily basis. So some people would actually dedicate that 15 hours to getting things done, and some people would still fill it up with bullshit and game the management metrics to maximize pay per unit of effort.

karmajunkie 10y ago

Anecdata, but I'm MUCH happier when working 15 instead of 35 and certainly 40-50 hours a week, provided I'm making the same money (or more to the point, keeping the same'ish lifestyle, albeit with more free time.) That doesn't mean I'm unoccupied an additional 20 hours a week, but being occupied with my choice of activities is way better.

glenneroo 10y ago
Contributing my own anecdata: I'm in a similar situation - I voluntarily started working 20 hours/week for the last 9 years. In my spare time I've taken up multiple new hobbies and cultivated older hobbies into semi-part-time jobs (a few hours a month). I can't ever imagine the torture of working 40+ hours/week ever again.

karmajunkie 10y ago

alexc05 10y ago

So a few years ago I read Tim Ferriss' "the four hour work week" - and while I will not go on a screed about the part that I find ridiculous, I do think the chapter (and recurring thread) about "what do you do with when you work 4 hours a week" is entirely relevant here. The summary / thesis of life-after-work is that we must "find a muse" - which is to say, since you no longer must work your entire life away, you may now re-allocate those same hours doing something that you love. Even something that you are wildly, obsessively, passionate about. A small portion of the current policy research around AI & Automation is how do we deal with the emotional fallout among people who feel they've lost their purpose. How do we convince people that it is OK to "take a handout"? There are really deep cultural implications to that idea. There are people who believe "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - consider the Georgia representative who very specifically floated the idea of making poor children sweep floors in schools in exchange for meals "in order to teach them the important life lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch" http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-clean-schools-in-exchange-for-lunch http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-... ... like that is someone who really believes in that as a principle as opposed to just a colloquialism. What would it do to their self esteem if they were suddenly taking free money? How many parents would be happy to spend an extra hour with their kids in the morning? A couple of extra hours at night? A few extra hours to learn guitar or beat that next level of super-mario?

Taylor_OD 10y ago
I've move from a company where I had to be there 9-5:30+ to a company with flex hours. Earlier in the week I leave around 3-4 somewhat regularly because on other days I have to be at work until 8:30+. Even with a couple extra hours at home a week it's hard to find exactly what I should be doing. I tried to put together a schedule of taking some online classes I've watched to for a while, writing, spending 30-1 hour playing games I've been meaning to play, and generally calling / talking to friends and family more. However I still find myself in a loop of checking reddit, youtube, facebook, and hackernews over and over around 7PM. I understand its a problem born from extreme privilege but if the future is filled with more free time it's a problem that many will run into.