8 ms·

I always wonder what people who complain about the 9-5 feel should be the alternative.

leggomylibro 7y ago
People need hope and agency to find meaning. The problem is not that people work between 9:00AM-5:00PM, it's that their job overwhelms the rest of their life with demands that they have no control over and cannot ever hope to escape. If you are a well-compensated tech worker, you probably have some measure of control over what you work on, even if that occasionally means voting with your feet. And you are probably able to save enough to leave and arbitrarily pursue your passions at least once a decade, whether that means going back to school, trying to start a business, getting more involved with your family, or just escaping a toxic environment. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that not everyone has those sorts of choices available to them.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Well, as someone who went from bankruptcy and low wage job to low wage job to college to my current tech job, I disagree to some extent. It may not be easy to get out of a low pay career trajectory but it's doable. It takes hard work and effort and a certain amount of social and mental intelligence.
  - c0nducktr 7y ago
    Ah, so if you don't have a certain amount of social and mental intelligence, then fuck you, right? You're reply is basically an example of survivorship bias.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      I mean, vast majority of people have an adequate level of intelligence to improve their lot in life and most do over the course of their life. My reply is an anecdote, not survivor bias. It's also peppered with observations of people in my own family and friend group. My dad started out as a mobile home factory worker, shifted to firefighting in his 30s then after 15 years of service became a chief and earned a lot more as a result and he's set to retire at 60. That's not bad, my dad doesn't have a college degree or anything like that. He just worked hard and was consistent. You can take a similar path in retail, manufacturing, construction, or any other number of industries that don't even require degrees. But you can't just do the minimum and do it poorly and expect to advance. It's not a bad thing that the system works that way. Rewarding hard work, and smart work, is what we want in an economic system.
  - buffet_overflow 7y ago
    Wow, what was the trigger for that, if you don't mind me asking?
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Because this is meloncholic. Both the article and the comment are fatalistic. First of all, it frames a 9-5 job as something to hate, which is a loaded opinion in and of itself. Rather than being grateful for having a job in a first world country, author and commenter choose to disdain it. Or frame it as slavery. It's privileged nonsense. If you have a job, you have something to be grateful for, first if all. Secondly, you always have free agency in a free country. If you don't like it, move on, but don't project your own self loathing or dissatisfaction onto other people. Plenty of people get a lot of satisfaction out of their jobs and provide for their families from 9-5s and don't look at it from this pessimistic angle. Those patterns of thought are either great if they inspire you to move onto other industries or toxic and bad for you if they cause you to become cynical.
      - leggomylibro 7y ago
        Y'know, we're supposed to try to look at comments on this site in a charitable way since it's hard to convey tone with text. I was actually disagreeing with the idea that 9-5 jobs need to be soul-sucking, and speaking from the perspective of someone who is able to decide what I work on. But it's important to understand why some people hate their situations and feel unable to escape them. Poverty traps are real, especially in the United States, and we should be doing more as a society to help people escape them. Also, I disagree that having a job is inherently something to be grateful for. Having a job is something to be paid for.
  - ska 7y ago
    I usually takes luck too. Sometimes the good kind. But more often, not the bad kind.
  - tw201908160248c 7y ago
    What if I told you there are people who are smarter than you and who have worked harder than you and will continue doing so, but for all their hard work and social and mental intelligence, these things are not sufficient on their own? There's such a thing as affordance[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance You're a qsort implementation who wasn't so unlucky as to be spammed with only pathological inputs. There are heapsorts who will fare worse for no other reason than being matched up with workloads that would've choked you, too.
Kecelij 7y ago
Working for yourself. Creating your own business, not being a slave to the system and being manipulated by media and the collective unconscious into thinking it's normal to work for someone, to sell your SELF, not your products (as it should be, in a rational society). Sadly, nothing about todays society is rational. But hey, if you wanna spend 1/3 of your life working a job you think is "OK", fucking have at it. I would be ashamed to have written on my tombstone "worked 1/3 of his life as a sys admin". There is no meaning in that. Just an empty job to have money, for what? For more stuff? To teach your children to do the same? Keeping materialistic corporations afloat with me taking care of the servers and stuff.
- paxys 7y ago
  If you create your own business are you going to hire people to work for you 9-5?
  - Kecelij 7y ago
    I would never do that. I am a jack of all trades and I intend to keep it that way. One man business.
    - endemic 7y ago
      You’re still beholden to the people who pay for your products/services.
      - kentrado 7y ago
        You will notice the different though. Those people only care about the end product, you can work however you like to get there. There's freedom in there.
    - paxys 7y ago
      If you are making it work for yourself then congratulations, but this is pretty unrealistic advice for almost everyone else.
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
esotericn 7y ago
9-1. 9-5 three days a week. Whatever. 40 hours labour just isn't necessary for all of us. We need to work to actually produce things like food and transport and so on. Services. The vast majority of people I know are not working for that. It's a side effect. We're in this absurd zero sum race to outbid each other for housing (and not just in SF/London, it's all over nowadays). Like, come on. Once you have an income at a level sufficient to spend, say, 50% on a house, get a mortgage etc, you have truly terrifying amounts of funds left over in terms of normal material goods in the prosperous towns.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  I don't know... I like all the 'extra' things I can get with money. Cool electronic toys, nice stuff for my house, a luxurious car with all the cool gadgets, vacations, etc. I like stuff. It is fun to play with.
  - PascLeRasc 7y ago
    If you found out you had a week to live, what stuff would you play with the most?
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      I would spend the week with my wife and kids, talking and helping them prepare for my absence. I am not sure how that changes me liking to play with gadgets.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Stuff can be good for distracting from your problems, but they're a terrible end for life. I really don't need most of the things that differentiate between being financially successful and not—really it's mostly healthcare and access to higher quality food.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Right. I tend to bounce around from low to high cost of living locations. My mindset changes a lot without it really being under my control. In a high CoL area the limits to what you want can be truly absurd because there's so much wealth swimming about. It's normal. It takes some grounding, but also interaction with a community that accepts you for who you are, to temper that.
NeoBasilisk 7y ago
how little imagination you have
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  You might share some of yours, instead of just making dismissive comments...
  - NeoBasilisk 7y ago
    Here are a few off the top of my head. 10-5 11-5 12-5 1-5 9-4 10-4 11-4 12-4 8-2 8-1 8-12 11-3 11-4 11-5 12-4 12-5 12-6 1-5 1-6 1-7 2-6 2-7 2-8 Or if you insist on keeping 9-5, then why not do it 4 days per week? After all, why do we only work 5 days/week? Could it be that maximizing the output of corporations is not the sole priority of a country?
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      After all, why do we only work 5 days/week? "In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute the five-day week. It did so to accommodate Jewish workers, whose observance of a Saturday sabbath forced them to make up their work on Sundays, offending some in the Christian majority. The mill granted these Jewish workers a two-day weekend, and other factories followed this example. The Great Depression cemented the two-day weekend into the economy, as shorter hours were considered a remedy to underemployment." - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-the-five-day-workweek-came-from/378870/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t... Then, influentially, Henry Ford dropped it down from six days of 14-16 hours, in 1926. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/09/five-day-work-week-became-popular/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/09/five-day-wor...
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      So you wasted all our time with this, and your answer is just "fewer hours"? That's your imagination? I'm unimpressed. And, for most of us, "less hours" is going to equal "less pay". How do you imagine that we should deal with that? Or do you imagine that the corporations (or the country) are just going to pay us anyway?
PascLeRasc 7y ago
The alternative is working for results, not methods or statistics like time-at-desk. That means working from home if it's best for you, or coming in 3 days per week, or working 10-4, or 8-12 and 2-6, or 9-5 if that happens to fit you best. No one's going to take away your 9-5.
- rokhayakebe 7y ago
  Exactly. Even in a factory you could tell employees that this is what they need to produce for the week. If they can get it done in 2 days, then so be it. If they cannot meet standards, you can just reassign them to a different task or let them go. You could also pay more/less for those who produce more/less. Work just needs to not be tied to time.
  - fyfy18 7y ago
    That works great until there is some sort of supply chain - either you rely on someone else, or they rely on you. In that case having everyone working at the same time is probably more efficient.
Aeolun 7y ago
9-9?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
profalseidol 7y ago
Ask again when you have kids and discovered that there is soooo much more to life than being a cog 99% of your life.

People need hope and agency to find meaning. The problem is not that people work between 9:00AM-5:00PM, it's that their job overwhelms the rest of their life with demands that they have no control over and cannot ever hope to escape. If you are a well-compensated tech worker, you probably have some measure of control over what you work on, even if that occasionally means voting with your feet. And you are probably able to save enough to leave and arbitrarily pursue your passions at least once a decade, whether that means going back to school, trying to start a business, getting more involved with your family, or just escaping a toxic environment. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that not everyone has those sorts of choices available to them.

chrisco255 7y ago
Well, as someone who went from bankruptcy and low wage job to low wage job to college to my current tech job, I disagree to some extent. It may not be easy to get out of a low pay career trajectory but it's doable. It takes hard work and effort and a certain amount of social and mental intelligence.
- c0nducktr 7y ago
  Ah, so if you don't have a certain amount of social and mental intelligence, then fuck you, right? You're reply is basically an example of survivorship bias.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    I mean, vast majority of people have an adequate level of intelligence to improve their lot in life and most do over the course of their life. My reply is an anecdote, not survivor bias. It's also peppered with observations of people in my own family and friend group. My dad started out as a mobile home factory worker, shifted to firefighting in his 30s then after 15 years of service became a chief and earned a lot more as a result and he's set to retire at 60. That's not bad, my dad doesn't have a college degree or anything like that. He just worked hard and was consistent. You can take a similar path in retail, manufacturing, construction, or any other number of industries that don't even require degrees. But you can't just do the minimum and do it poorly and expect to advance. It's not a bad thing that the system works that way. Rewarding hard work, and smart work, is what we want in an economic system.
- buffet_overflow 7y ago
  Wow, what was the trigger for that, if you don't mind me asking?
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Because this is meloncholic. Both the article and the comment are fatalistic. First of all, it frames a 9-5 job as something to hate, which is a loaded opinion in and of itself. Rather than being grateful for having a job in a first world country, author and commenter choose to disdain it. Or frame it as slavery. It's privileged nonsense. If you have a job, you have something to be grateful for, first if all. Secondly, you always have free agency in a free country. If you don't like it, move on, but don't project your own self loathing or dissatisfaction onto other people. Plenty of people get a lot of satisfaction out of their jobs and provide for their families from 9-5s and don't look at it from this pessimistic angle. Those patterns of thought are either great if they inspire you to move onto other industries or toxic and bad for you if they cause you to become cynical.
    - leggomylibro 7y ago
      Y'know, we're supposed to try to look at comments on this site in a charitable way since it's hard to convey tone with text. I was actually disagreeing with the idea that 9-5 jobs need to be soul-sucking, and speaking from the perspective of someone who is able to decide what I work on. But it's important to understand why some people hate their situations and feel unable to escape them. Poverty traps are real, especially in the United States, and we should be doing more as a society to help people escape them. Also, I disagree that having a job is inherently something to be grateful for. Having a job is something to be paid for.
- ska 7y ago
  I usually takes luck too. Sometimes the good kind. But more often, not the bad kind.
- tw201908160248c 7y ago
  What if I told you there are people who are smarter than you and who have worked harder than you and will continue doing so, but for all their hard work and social and mental intelligence, these things are not sufficient on their own? There's such a thing as affordance[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance You're a qsort implementation who wasn't so unlucky as to be spammed with only pathological inputs. There are heapsorts who will fare worse for no other reason than being matched up with workloads that would've choked you, too.

Kecelij 7y ago

Working for yourself. Creating your own business, not being a slave to the system and being manipulated by media and the collective unconscious into thinking it's normal to work for someone, to sell your SELF, not your products (as it should be, in a rational society). Sadly, nothing about todays society is rational. But hey, if you wanna spend 1/3 of your life working a job you think is "OK", fucking have at it. I would be ashamed to have written on my tombstone "worked 1/3 of his life as a sys admin". There is no meaning in that. Just an empty job to have money, for what? For more stuff? To teach your children to do the same? Keeping materialistic corporations afloat with me taking care of the servers and stuff.

paxys 7y ago
If you create your own business are you going to hire people to work for you 9-5?
- Kecelij 7y ago
  I would never do that. I am a jack of all trades and I intend to keep it that way. One man business.
  - endemic 7y ago
    You’re still beholden to the people who pay for your products/services.
    - kentrado 7y ago
      You will notice the different though. Those people only care about the end product, you can work however you like to get there. There's freedom in there.
  - paxys 7y ago
    If you are making it work for yourself then congratulations, but this is pretty unrealistic advice for almost everyone else.
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

esotericn 7y ago

9-1. 9-5 three days a week. Whatever. 40 hours labour just isn't necessary for all of us. We need to work to actually produce things like food and transport and so on. Services. The vast majority of people I know are not working for that. It's a side effect. We're in this absurd zero sum race to outbid each other for housing (and not just in SF/London, it's all over nowadays). Like, come on. Once you have an income at a level sufficient to spend, say, 50% on a house, get a mortgage etc, you have truly terrifying amounts of funds left over in terms of normal material goods in the prosperous towns.

cortesoft 7y ago
I don't know... I like all the 'extra' things I can get with money. Cool electronic toys, nice stuff for my house, a luxurious car with all the cool gadgets, vacations, etc. I like stuff. It is fun to play with.
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  If you found out you had a week to live, what stuff would you play with the most?
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    I would spend the week with my wife and kids, talking and helping them prepare for my absence. I am not sure how that changes me liking to play with gadgets.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Stuff can be good for distracting from your problems, but they're a terrible end for life. I really don't need most of the things that differentiate between being financially successful and not—really it's mostly healthcare and access to higher quality food.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Right. I tend to bounce around from low to high cost of living locations. My mindset changes a lot without it really being under my control. In a high CoL area the limits to what you want can be truly absurd because there's so much wealth swimming about. It's normal. It takes some grounding, but also interaction with a community that accepts you for who you are, to temper that.

NeoBasilisk 7y ago

how little imagination you have

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
You might share some of yours, instead of just making dismissive comments...
- NeoBasilisk 7y ago
  Here are a few off the top of my head. 10-5 11-5 12-5 1-5 9-4 10-4 11-4 12-4 8-2 8-1 8-12 11-3 11-4 11-5 12-4 12-5 12-6 1-5 1-6 1-7 2-6 2-7 2-8 Or if you insist on keeping 9-5, then why not do it 4 days per week? After all, why do we only work 5 days/week? Could it be that maximizing the output of corporations is not the sole priority of a country?
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    After all, why do we only work 5 days/week? "In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute the five-day week. It did so to accommodate Jewish workers, whose observance of a Saturday sabbath forced them to make up their work on Sundays, offending some in the Christian majority. The mill granted these Jewish workers a two-day weekend, and other factories followed this example. The Great Depression cemented the two-day weekend into the economy, as shorter hours were considered a remedy to underemployment." - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-the-five-day-workweek-came-from/378870/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t... Then, influentially, Henry Ford dropped it down from six days of 14-16 hours, in 1926. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/09/five-day-work-week-became-popular/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/09/five-day-wor...
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    So you wasted all our time with this, and your answer is just "fewer hours"? That's your imagination? I'm unimpressed. And, for most of us, "less hours" is going to equal "less pay". How do you imagine that we should deal with that? Or do you imagine that the corporations (or the country) are just going to pay us anyway?

PascLeRasc 7y ago

The alternative is working for results, not methods or statistics like time-at-desk. That means working from home if it's best for you, or coming in 3 days per week, or working 10-4, or 8-12 and 2-6, or 9-5 if that happens to fit you best. No one's going to take away your 9-5.

rokhayakebe 7y ago
Exactly. Even in a factory you could tell employees that this is what they need to produce for the week. If they can get it done in 2 days, then so be it. If they cannot meet standards, you can just reassign them to a different task or let them go. You could also pay more/less for those who produce more/less. Work just needs to not be tied to time.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  That works great until there is some sort of supply chain - either you rely on someone else, or they rely on you. In that case having everyone working at the same time is probably more efficient.

Aeolun 7y ago

9-9?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

profalseidol 7y ago

Ask again when you have kids and discovered that there is soooo much more to life than being a cog 99% of your life.