8 ms·

The consequences would be terrible! We would have to wait 18 months between each iteration of Iphone instead of 12. Amazon would deliver at day+2. Uber Eats wou

• dasanman 8y ago
  Oh my god yes. Actually we should work 6 days a week, imagine how fast the new Iphone would come out!!
  • de_watcher 8y ago
    Is it a good thing?
    • mberger 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure parent posts are sarcastic.
  • adrianN 8y ago
    Have you considered what would happen if we added meth to the drinking water? People wouldn't sleep and could work twice as long!
    • the_clarence 8y ago
      I thought we had already five that by making coffee mainstream?
      • trinitry3 8y ago
        Did we just seriously compare coffee to meth?
    • ashelmire 8y ago
      Do you want reavers? Because that's how you get reavers.
    • prolikewh0a 8y ago
      I wouldn't doubt this idea has come up at least once in some shareholder meeting.
      • lolive 8y ago
        Didn't they use meth during WW2 on the russian front?
      • jrockway 8y ago
        It does. I think apenwarr has a good outlook on this: "maybe we can just have the engineers work weekends or something? Well, I think most of us know that's a losing battle. First of all, even if we could get engineers to work, say, on Saturdays without any other losses (eg. burnout), that would only be a 20% improvement. 20%? Give me a break. If I said I was going to do a talk about how to improve your team's efficiency by 20%, you wouldn't even come. You can produce 20% more by hiring one more person for your 5-person team, and nobody even has to work overtime. Forget it. https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201712 https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201712
        • adrianN 8y ago
          If only hiring 20% more people would mean 20% more efficiency we would have a lot fewer problems.
          • jrockway 8y ago
            Sure, but there are a lot of efficiency killers to look for before you need to worry about individual hours worked. Adding 20% more people doesn't make the software come out 20% faster because: 1) Multiple people need to work on the same critical section of the code, and then there are merge conflicts. (Or people disagree on the design, or refactoring becomes a higher priority than doing what users want, etc.) 2) People work sloppily and omit relevant tests, only for someone else to have to re-discover the bug, fix it, and write the tests (trading productivity from one person to another). 3) People work on the wrong tasks, adding 20% more technical debt but not fixing 20% of the highest-priority bugs. 4) People take 20% less responsibility so you end up with "someone else will handle that (where "that" is usually documentation, monitoring, deployment, or anything else not explicitly captured in your list of bugs/priorities). It is very interesting to me how internal software development often fails (I'm sure I've been the point of failure before), but software development CAN scale. I use AWS, for example, and I'm sure their software engineering teams are messing with products/features that my team uses. But they don't make me 20% slower. Ultimately, overly-tight coupling gets you every time. But on the other hand, too much isolation can also be a problem (time spent overengineering). If you find that balance, you can scale your team infinitely ;)
    • goliatone 8y ago
      not the greatest source but still informative https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220083916.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220083916.h...
• Treegarden 8y ago
  Why cant things be more flexible, eg. you have a 7 day workweek but personally you only work 4 days? This seems like a good idea especially given more automation and more higher level jobs.
  • krapp 8y ago
    Because most jobs require correlation of schedules between roles, or suppliers and vendors, a minimum viable number of staff, or deadlines which need to be met. A cashier, for instance, can't simply decide not to come in to work for half the week, or to only work overnight when it's easier. Everyone would do that, and the business would lose money. >This seems like a good idea especially given more automation and more higher level jobs. Automation means fewer jobs and less flexibility, not the opposite. The more work machines do, the less value human labor has, the harder employers have to squeeze their employees to even make a profit from them. One just has to look at a company like Amazon to see how that trend leads.
    • jrockway 8y ago
      But many don't. Many things are planned on the scale of quarters, not hours. In that case, it doesn't actually matter what hours people work, as long as things are done by the deadline. I've certainly worked for companies where other companies contracted out their software development tasks to us. They did not care what hours we worked; they spent their money and expected a result X months later. Whether we worked on their project from 9-5 was something they would not even know, much less care about.
  • MrEfficiency 8y ago
    I have this mentality. Sure M-F, 9-5, most work gets done, but there are times where nothing is happening at 4PM and there are times that I'm needed Saturday morning. The future will be defined by roles at big companies rather than hours of attendance.
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I could hide from the clients for weeks! Weeks I say! "Oh, sorry, our schedules really only overlap for a day and I'm booked solid. How about next month?"
• ken 8y ago
  Are you claiming a 4-day work week would result in less productivity? The article makes a good case for the opposite. How do you explain the "paradoxical magic" in the final third of the article where, in every historical case of shortening work hours, "management was surprised to discover that output actually increased — and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased"? Or the recent example of the Boston firm that took a day off in the middle of every week, and whose clients "reported an improvement in service"? Are there any examples of companies going to a 4-day-week and reporting decreased productivity?
  • lev99 8y ago
    If someone is overworked their productivity decreases. If you start cutting hours their productivity will increase up to a point, when they become underworked. What's the right amount of worked? You cannot keep cutting hours and expect productivity to go up indefinitely. In addition, the right number of hours probably has some variability among the population. I'm very much against a one sized fits all amount work environment.
• jrockway 8y ago
  Everyone should work _7_ days a week. iPhones will come out every year instead of every 18 months! Amazon would have same-day delivery! Uber Eats would answer: "your food is on its way!" Very acceptable !!! Stop slacking off by taking 2 days off out of every 5! (On a serious note, I think you will find that productivity does not scale linearly over the number of days per week worked.)