19 ms·

Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

345 points by kamiYcombi 7y ago

astonex 7y ago
Something like 30 hours a week, 4 days a week cant come soon enough. Right now I work 40-45, 5 days a week and it feels like all I do is work and chores.
- HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
  Have you heard of biphasic sleep? 6 hours at night and a 20 minute nap saves 12 hours a week. I've been doing it with my wife for 4 years, feel good and it's made me happier. Wake up after work like it's a new day. I'm one of the rare types that like working, and this has me doing 40 hrs plus home projects.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Two questions Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes. Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.
  - namelosw 7y ago
    I would be more than happy to work 1 day per week and live with 20% of my current salary. I believe a lot of people can accept 80% salary for 4 days per week.
    - sancha_ 7y ago
      My previous company allowed people to work 4 days for 80% pay. Out of 60 people, 3 people took advantage of that.
      - a_imho 7y ago
        Which company? Whenever I offered to work 60% of the time for 50% of the money I was flat out rejected.
      - namelosw 7y ago
        I'm curious. Could you by any chance know some reason behind this? Is the salary not sufficient for the zone, or people do enjoy working, or they just simply think they would be bored as they take it?
      - joncrane 7y ago
        Probably because opportunity for advancement becomes nil when you're not "all in."
  - tc7 7y ago
    Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers). My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got a paid off house.
      - yabadabadoes 7y ago
        The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away. edit oops- <20..
        quickthrower2 7y ago
        Can you elaborate on why? Is this a tax related thing? Or benefits related?
        yabadabadoes 7y ago
        Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.) As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.
    - JanSt 7y ago
      The possibility to work part time with pro-rata pay is mandated by law in some countries under certain conditions (15+ employees,...) (i.e. Germany).
  - lerpoel 7y ago
    Mandate 4 day weeks and see if salaries go down. I would guess not as companies still need to keep their workforce.
    - rayvd 7y ago
      What about those of us who want to work more than four days?
      - atom058 7y ago
        Some people work 6-7 days a week already. So if they're working under that arrangement now, it will probably be fine for them to work more than mandatory hours in the future also.
  - andrekandre 7y ago
    i guess the idea is, considering how much worker productivity has improved over the decades, even working 4 days a week, one should still be able to survive just fine (at least that is my interpretation)
  - kittko 7y ago
    Personal anecdota: it definitely seems like a huge part of the people in my city (Zurich) are working 80% (4-day week for 80% pay).
  - JTbane 7y ago
    >>Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes. Uh, probably not. Unless you mean part-time work. Or 10 hour days.
- b3n 7y ago
  30 hours a day seems quite extreme to me.
  - astonex 7y ago
    Well for starters, looking at the charts in the link 30 hours is still much more productive than the 40hr 1975 worker. As a programmer I'm not doing focused programming for any more than 30 hours a week anyway
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      You might be productive, but you can't produce 6 hours a day from nothing.
      - Mtinie 7y ago
        —— For immediate release. CERN is proud to announce it will resume LHC operations shortly after a major system sensitivity upgrade and is poised to launch a new set of tests on behalf of their corporate donors. This year marks the first time scientists will seek proof of the (not-yet-)theorized “anti-second”. According to the head of the program, Dr. Ismadeup: “When the efforts of our labors are successful, the rules of physics will fundamentally change! This discovery will allow corporate taskmasters and mindful spouses to extract even more productivity from those under their sway.” Athletic organizations, alcohol distributors, and adult media companies are eagerly awaiting the commercialization of any resulting technological enhancements derived from the research.
        antisemiotic 7y ago
        Finally I can ditch the portable black hole I was using for work hour dilatation.
    - epaga 7y ago
      He was joking because you said 30 hours a day
HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
Living standards remained constant while productivity went up? Interesting. I have a multi color LED strip I'm looking at. Posting this on the internet from a smartphone in a far bigger house than a 1950s engineer, my car has worked for 12 years.... Here is a question, can we take this author seriously? Citations are nice, but it doesn't meet with reality. Why is this author proposing living standards are the same?
sravi2421 7y ago
Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising? And how does that compare to this rise in productivity? Until those two pieces get solved, productivity gains don't matter since everyone needs to produce/earn more to just get those basic needs fulfilled.
- Razengan 7y ago
  What is productivity?
  - LeonB 7y ago
    For some things it’s easy to measure: eg how much wheat is produced per hour of farm labor. Some easy to measure things don’t rise and it’s easy to see why, e.g. how many students does one teacher teach in a given day. Productivity in the aggregate is “the gross national” product and is calculated by the bureau of statistics. This is divided by the total number of hours worked. Must be a very big spreadsheet. :)
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    GDP per labour hour.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising? But wait, part of the problem is that productivity growth has effectively decoupled from wage growth since the 70s (in the US, maybe the UK, and similar but not as drastic trends in other comparable Western countries). I find it odd that the article barely even mentions it in passing.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Are healthcare and education demponstrably multiple times better than in the 1950s? Are lifespans multiples of what they were in the 1950s? Are college graduates multiple times more intelligent than they were in the 1950s? Is housing multiple times better than what it was in the 1950s? Or are all these gatekeeping functions capturing rents?
bubbabojangles 7y ago
Perhaps if we were not handing over most of the productivity gains of society to CEOs, the rest of us would not need to work so many hours. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
- chrstphrhrt 7y ago
  What really gets me about this as a sometimes-entrepreneur, is that management is not even taking personal risks. Besides narrow cases of torts and their need to have fiduciary duties, they are no different from other staff workers.
firepoet 7y ago
The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.
- tc7 7y ago
  Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case. I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)
  - vlan0 7y ago
    Maybe? I know I make about the same as my uncle did working for Ernst & Young (in DC) during the late 90s early 2000s. However, neither of us were/are in development.
  - nabnob 7y ago
    I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambda-school-raised-30m-to-expand-its-income-sharing-tuition-plan-for-online-coding-students/#278dcfe02c68 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambd...
  - zanny 7y ago
    There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo. And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create. Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune. So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.
d4nt 7y ago
I think many people would work less if they could afford to. But we're not getting paid for all this extra productivity[1]. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/#279de59b7342 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...
- knightofmars 7y ago
  Ah yes, Tim Worstall. Every time I read one of his articles I end up thinking, "He touched on this important related aspect of his topic but then failed to actually detail how it impacts his claim, both for and against." I this article, he mentions "total compensation" includes benefits and suggests that those benefits somehow make up the missing wages. From a pure numbers perspective, the increase in benefits is an increase in total compensation. But it doesn't call out that most of those "missing wages" have been absorbed into handle rising healthcare costs. The people who are receiving these "increased benefits" haven't received anything other than the same healthcare but now they pay more for it.
UglyToad 7y ago
I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll leave software for good. Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it doesn't scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office / scrum) you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time. It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted. I meet software developers who advocate for, or don't mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days and I simply don't understand it, it's alien to me. Are they being productive all that time? Edit: to clarify (since I've posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5 hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Yeah, I also see this issue. It's made worse by Agile/Scrum that assumes during the planning poker meeting that every dev has 8 hours per day available of constant flow while the real value being maybe 5-6 if you're lucky so you end up cutting corners or burned out due to the stress of meeting the target velocity.
  - Lewton 7y ago
    Not an inherent agile/scrum problem, we assume 6 hours availability per day during planning in my team
    - JulianMorrison 7y ago
      Which is still about 3 more than reality
    - Chris2048 7y ago
Lynbarry 7y ago
I reduced my time at work to 80% at the beginning of July. Every Friday is my day now. This week I had to switch it up so today is my day off. It's 1pm and I have already worked out, ran some errands that had been bugging me and am now reading this in one of my favorite diners which I for some reason almost never found the time to go to before. If you have the chance and it seems intriguing to you I encourage everyone to try it out. I guess not all workplaces support it in the same way as mine does, but it was possible for me to have a three month trial phase after which I can go back to 100% or decide to continue the 80% for a year. Maybe your workplace would be open for that but you just don't know! Of course it's quite the pay cut, but as a developer with few obligations I can still manage quite well. I feel much more relaxed over all and I enjoy my work more when I'm there. It even subjectively feels like I'm getting more done at work. The weekend feels so much longer and relaxing, because stuff I normally do on the weekend often is already done. One problem for me is that I tend to cram a lot into my Fridays. I feel like I have to use them to their full potential. Then when the weather doesn't work out or something else falls through I'm pretty bummed. But I think that is something that can be improved over time.
- glormph 7y ago
  This sounds awesome. I'm held back a bit, I have always been warned against working less than a full workweek, since it would presumely substantially harm my (European) retirement build-up (unless I would make a lot more money than I currently do). I have never investigated yet, but would before cutting working hours.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  It's certainly something I'd love to trial. I think most people probably look at their take home pay and imagine that taking 20% off of that figure would be a big cut. In the UK at least, as a higher-rate tax payer (40% tax) it wouldn't be nearly as bad as that seems. At the moment we're looking at nursery for our 7 month old 2 days per week. If instead I could work 4 days a week it would be a wash financially. I'd get the benefits of spending more time with her but obviously looking after a < 1 year old isn't 'a day off' by any stretch.
- diveloper 7y ago
Majromax 7y ago
Unfortunately, the mid-noughts vintage of this page is showing. After about 2010, productivity growth has not kept up with the page's 1.7% estimate (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn). Also, this page neglects the influence of heterogeneous productivity changes. Some fields don't experience the same kind of productivity growth that we've seen in manufacturing (and services aided by technology); for example a doctor now is not seeing four times as many patients as a doctor in 1940. A barber now is not cutting the hair of four people at once. You can't productivity-gain your way out of the costs of dedicated attention from individuals.
jswet 7y ago
“Productivity” means something very different for assembly line workers than it does for retail workers. As productivity has improved over time, we actually have seen the expected reduction of hours, but it varies by occupation. A much smaller number of people work in manufacturing now, while the ranks of retail and white collar workers have grown. People are moving towards occupations where “productivity” is harder to gauge and not necessarily the most important metric at all times. The increase in productivity in some sectors and the migration of workers to new sectors are broadly related, too, since the former requires technological advance, which is the result of cognitive work and creates more need for white collar and cognitive work.
Expez 7y ago
I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work 4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so this works out well. It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90% of them were completely pointless) as well as take more breaks for stuff like hn. I'd guess that I'm producing about 90% of the value I used to, but putting in way less hours. This isn't a bad deal for my employer, I think. The pay cut kind of sucks, but I'm still making the national median salary because developers are paid so generously. A lot of people opt to take whole days off, when they work less hours, but I find this arrangement works much better for me. It gives me more time for hobbies, friends and family, working out, eating healthy etc in the day-to-day.
- Whygul 7y ago
  Where do you work that gives you this option if you don't mind sharing a little more?
  - tadzik_ 7y ago
    Not OP but I have a similar workstyle: I work half-time for one client (remotely), 4 hours a week for another (also remotely) and occasionally take side gigs like teaching or something. The remote work is mostly in Norway, I live in Poland, so the pay cut is not noticable – the fact that "I could be making twice as much if I worked “normally”" is something that always is in the back of my head, but is somewhat dimished by the fact that I still make more than a typical fulltime salary would net me here in Poland. Being a contractor in a niche technology (in my case it's Perl) is great for this, because the companies involved can't really say "work more or we'll find someone else" – we both know that they won't ;) Also, beyond 4-5 hours a day my (and afaik everyone else's) productivity is diminishing anyway, so it's not like they're losing much because of it.
  - Expez 7y ago
    In-house product development of a SaaS platform. You can check out it out at ardoq.com. The company is imo a great place to work, but this is also in Norway where it's pretty common for people (usually older ones, though) to work 80 or 60%. That probably made this a lot more likely to happen. I'll add that there was some fear that everyone else would want the same arrangement and that we'd suddenly only have devs working part time, but nobody else has expressed any interest in this. Different strokes for different folks...
amiga_500 7y ago
People aren’t motivated because work is an endless treadmill. Financial independence a roll of the loaded startup dice. The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just the rich, like YC VCs. All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus value.
- mlevental 7y ago
  you're going to get downvoted the all the protestant work ethic people that think labor is virtuous per se - "an honest day's work is reward in and of itself" type thing (forgetting or conveniently omitting that these values/virtues were defined by capital not labor). I agree with you and many more would too if they didn't see themselves as "temporarily aggrieved millionaires".
  - yourapostasy 7y ago
    As Iain Banks put it his The Culture universe, "money is a sign of poverty". We're hopefully still in the tricky beginning of a transition phase to a post-scarcity civilization. Just need that fusion reactor to start with...
sweeneyrod 7y ago
> The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week. The logical conclusion from this seems to me to be "productivity doesn't mean anything". If we all have four times as much stuff as in 1950 (rather than working fewer hours) then where is it? Obviously there have been a lot of amazing technological developments since the fifties but most of them aren't that expensive: if you sold your computer/phone/etc. you wouldn't be four times richer.
coldtea 7y ago
Someone wrote here about whether 3 hours or so out of 8 being productive "is not just peculiar to software work. There's an old post from a photographer blogger and funny guy if somewhat controversial [1]: > The Two-Hour Rule is a law of American business which states that "no salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed two hours of actual work in any business day." > The Two-Hour Rule does not apply to government workers (police, fire, military, libraries, public works, etc.), independent contractors, services billed hourly or apply outside the USA. I'll cover these at the end. The Two-Hour Rule applies to people working at government subcontractors because they are businesses. > The Two-Hour Rule was created to ensure that American business thrived on efficiency, not on dumb hard work, so that Americans could enjoy the lives they had earned." https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm [1] Naive amateurs with religious feels about photography and its "rules" tend to hate him, for such advice as "just shoot JPEG" (as if shooting RAW, and squeezing that extra quality is not a tradeoff of file size/storage/post processing, but a holy duty of everyone who photographs, even if it's just BS family/travel/pet pics nobody would ever really care about - not even the family/pet).
- Palomides 7y ago
  this fits in really well with https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... , thanks for sharing, I think it's very useful to get these alternate perspectives on the corporate grind
- raihansaputra 7y ago
  I was an avid reader of his blog, but never read that. Genius. On the footnote: reading his advice over and over again made me a better photographer. I still shoot RAW, as I like editing, but his advice on just sticking with AUTO is what made me far more productive rather that fiddling with trying to get the best shutter speed/aperture.
youareostriches 7y ago
Working fewer hours is absolutely required as a practice of degrowth to reduce CO2 emissions and limit ecosystem damage.
muzani 7y ago
Tech actually seems really optimal for this. I get assigned a 8 hour task. I spend 4 hours trying to get it done in 4 hours. The next time I get the same task, it takes 4 hours. I can optimize it even further if it happens a lot, get it done in 10 minutes. I can 'siphon off' time this way, lowering estimates a little, cutting time spent by a lot, then basically reinvesting the saved time into rest or productivity. The other day we had a meeting; I got all the work done before the meeting ended then waited an hour before showing the result. There are lots of tricks, like figuring out keyboard shortcuts, IDE plugins, or simply refactoring staging/production builds into a single button. It's surprising how much mental effort and time a shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + F saves. The long term goal is to be so productive that I can probably negotiate a shorter work week or more vacation days instead of a raise, as I already get paid a comfortable amount.
- tacostakohashi 7y ago
  You can absolutely do that to a huge extent, but good luck actually capturing the productivity gains as an employee. You won't be rewarded with shorter days or salary increases, certainly not in proportion to your productivity increases. At best, you can use the siphoned off time for learning new things, or networking your way into management. Employers don't value that kind of thing, possibly because although it increases your efficiency, it also leads to a complicated, brittle environment that is difficult to scale to many employees, and staff that are less interchange and harder to replace.
scottlocklin 7y ago
Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary? Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're not measuring the right things. If the bare rudiments; food, housing, family creation cost the same or more, but we claim productivity has increased because ... I dunno we can sit on our fat asses and watch netflix instead of going to a movie theater: that's not measuring the right things. Edit add: even assuming all the productivity gains have only benefitted, say, the top 10%, you'd see more people who could buy a house and make a family working 10 hours a week.
- zackmorris 7y ago
  It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem. We could have automated things like solar energy production in the early 80s but the powers that be said no. We could have done similar things with mass transit, or organic farming, or wireless telecommunications, but that top 10% with all the money kept saying no. So here we are decades later still paying for the long term costs of technical debt in our economy. The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. Planning and zoning put homes too far away from workplaces. Houses are still built of wood 2x4s instead of recycled materials. Heck, we still build homes mostly by hand. Not to mention that land prices are hyper inflated due to the age old power imbalance between land owners and plebeians. We're basically living in the 1999 economy from the Matrix movies 20 years later. I think it's either going to take a mainstream movement towards some of the democratic socialism ideas from Europe or organizing on a mass scale to solve these problems. Unfortunately politicians and the elite will do everything in their power to stop real progress like that, until (like with solar) it becomes cheap enough that it can be rolled out without government incentives.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you there are political problems, but this is a measurement problem. >The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. If productivity had truly quadrupled since 1950, it doesn't matter what the externalities of homes are; not even the fact that they're still made by hand. If it takes X worth of labor and materials to build a house at t0 and t1 and societal productivity has gone from y to 4y between t0 and t1, there should be some large fraction of the population at t1 who can afford a house on 1/4 of t0 hours. There isn't. You can't even say that modern houses are better in any sense than 1950s houses; they mostly are not (energy efficiency maybe; even that is dubious). I think the thing we have to come to accept as a society is that productivity and efficiency increases are a mirage.
perfunctory 7y ago
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. -- John Maynard Keynes http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
akavi 7y ago
It's a little odd that the link doesn't mention that average working hours has in fact gone down over time in the United States, from 1989 hours over a year in 1950 to 1,757 hours in 2017[0]. That's a decrease of roughly 12%. Not as much as if all of productivity increases had gone into increasing leisure, but I'm not sure you'd expect that to have happened. This trend seems fairly robust across countries and extending even further back in time. The average work week in the USA was 62 hours in 1870, and was 40.25 hours in 2000, a decline of 29% [1]. My suspicion is that this actually understates the increase in leisure time, as many household chores are presumably easier due to modern tech. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-working-hours-per-year-after-the-industrial-revolution https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-work...
ale22 7y ago
I think we need to limit the labor pool size to increase the bargaining position of employees. As far as US is concerned, that means, limiting immigration numbers.
wazoox 7y ago
Do you know why work is so much more productive? Because so much is automated away, and relies on machines. Each and every worker works using lots of machines. Of course, the more machines you can make work the more productivity you have. When a large part of your work can't be delegated to machines, for instance nursing a baby, talking to people face to face, etc (mostly "human relations" things) then your productivity can't augment as much. This is also why "human work" earns less than "things work". Do you know what machines use to work? Energy. In the end, energy availability is the ultimate constraint. Good old thermodynamics. Why can't anything grow forever (and surely not GDP)? because of available energy, and thermodynamics.
twodave 7y ago
My work/life balance has changed a lot in the last 5 or so years. I've done all of the above (in chronological order): FTE 100% in the office FTE 100% remote (same company, living in the same city) FT Contract on-site plus consulting FT Contract on-site minus consulting FTE 100% remote (HQ 4-5 hour drive away, quarterly-ish visits) FTE 100% on-site FTE* "wherever" plus 10-15 hours/wk consulting Right now I'm a FTE at one place where I probably _actually_ spend about 35 hours/week working and then I am on monthly retainer for my old employer (through my consulting corp). I wake up before 6 most mornings and either put in a few consulting hours or go do crossfit. Then 9-noonish I try and be productive at my full-time job. I usually a long lunch/run errands after that, and then a couple more hours for the full-time job in the afternoon. I'm usually done working by 4:30 or 5pm and then it's time to either cook or go to the in-laws or order food depending on how I feel (I'm the cook and we're a family of 6). I have found the variety of doing multiple jobs keeps me much more productive in general, because I can basically work on what I want whenever I'm motivated to. The end of the month/sprint can be rough sometimes if I have procrastinated (or just not felt motivated at one job or the other), but every month when I get a check in the mail I feel freshly motivated haha.
nbrempel 7y ago
The number of times this topic has come up on HN recently is really surprising. It seems 1 or 2 posts on this topic hit the front page just about every day. I run a newsletter and job board called 30 Hour Jobs [1] – I started the project about 6 months ago and it seems like my timing couldn't have been any better. Usually, I try not to shamelessly plug my own projects too often but I can't help but share it in the comments when the topic is so relevant! [1] https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com
KineticLensman 7y ago
I do a three day week with a corresponding pay cut. Incidentally, this puts me in the same position, time-wise, as women returning from maternity leave, so the shorter hours don't mark me out particularly. My co-workers are fine with it, and if a surge is needed, I can work longer weeks and accrue Time Off In Lieu. There is no way that I would go back to a routine five day week. I'm doing this to prep for the more significant transition of fully retiring, so that I don't hit the cliff edge of going from full-time to nothing. Stopping work is still going to be a bit of a shock, but I genuinely feel part-time working is helping me to prepare for inevitable retirement.
soufron 7y ago
As a good tip, in order to keep my workweek short, I try not to work on Wednesday and Friday, and of course, on the week end. This means I try to work 3 days a week only. I usually can do it pretty much easily.
blunte 7y ago
Cost of living increases almost every year. Value of money decreases somewhat from inflation. Worker salaries have not been increasing on pace with inflation, much less cost of living increases, since oh... the Reagan years. What has increased dramatically since the Reagan years is executive pay and wealth of top 1%. What has also increased is consumer debt, particularly during the Clinton years. At the same time that consumer debt was increasing, interest rates (for consumers, not the prime rate) were climbing quickly to their legal limits. Also, those legal limits were occasionally being increased. Yes consumers are consuming more stuff, and yes most of that extra consumption is rather wasteful and provides decreasing benefit in terms of quality of life or happiness. But the rate of some consumption is going down. Modern computers, TVs, and even mobile phones now can do so much more than most users need that there is less and less reason to upgrade frequently. Buying a new car every couple of years is a great way to waste money. But generally speaking, "the people" aren't living larger than they did 20-30 years ago. There's very little doubt that the vast majority of the value of the increased productivity output has gone to the top 1%. That's factually visible even without exposing the many sources of hidden offshore wealth that is sometimes estimated to be multiple times larger than the known wealth.
franciscop 7y ago
I want to note that there's something that has been rarely mentioned in these threads and I wonder why: longer education time (and earlier retirement). On my parents generation a small percentage of people went to university, and on my grandparents generation most people started working on their early teens (post-war, I'm from Spain). In contrast, today having an undergraduate degree is very common, and a master or even doctorate is no rare. This makes a 10-15 year difference of no-work time to our lives, which is ~1/4th of our work lives. Where before we were expected to work from 16 to 66 years old (~50 years), now we are expected to work from 22 years old to 62 years old (40 years). Only this is a reduction of work by 20%, or a full work day. To add on top of that, our life expectancy has been increasing in all developed countries (except, USA). While this does not take away work time, it does add leisure time to our lives. To be clear, I agree with the article and sentiment here and we should be working shorter weeks. Only wanted to note this since many people seem to ignore it when discussing work week.
lbj 7y ago
Interestingly we did a survey such as this on our massive danish government and it turns out that since the 1950s there has been a 0% productivity increase, the wages have however followed increases in the private sector.
ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
We should be having official 4 hour workdays. State mandated. We can only do about four hours of solid work. There’s really no tricks to productivity. Just trying to mask fatigue, I suppose. But me? I don’t do any real work until after lunch. Maybe a meeting, to manage my managers, of course. I learned this just in recent years tho. Before that, I was as neurotic as anyone.

345 points by kamiYcombi 7y ago

Something like 30 hours a week, 4 days a week cant come soon enough. Right now I work 40-45, 5 days a week and it feels like all I do is work and chores.

HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
Have you heard of biphasic sleep? 6 hours at night and a 20 minute nap saves 12 hours a week. I've been doing it with my wife for 4 years, feel good and it's made me happier. Wake up after work like it's a new day. I'm one of the rare types that like working, and this has me doing 40 hrs plus home projects.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Two questions Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes. Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.
- namelosw 7y ago
  I would be more than happy to work 1 day per week and live with 20% of my current salary. I believe a lot of people can accept 80% salary for 4 days per week.
  - sancha_ 7y ago
    My previous company allowed people to work 4 days for 80% pay. Out of 60 people, 3 people took advantage of that.
    - a_imho 7y ago
      Which company? Whenever I offered to work 60% of the time for 50% of the money I was flat out rejected.
    - namelosw 7y ago
      I'm curious. Could you by any chance know some reason behind this? Is the salary not sufficient for the zone, or people do enjoy working, or they just simply think they would be bored as they take it?
    - joncrane 7y ago
      Probably because opportunity for advancement becomes nil when you're not "all in."
- tc7 7y ago
  Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers). My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got a paid off house.
    - yabadabadoes 7y ago
      The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away. edit oops- <20..
      - quickthrower2 7y ago
        Can you elaborate on why? Is this a tax related thing? Or benefits related?
        yabadabadoes 7y ago
        Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.) As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.
  - JanSt 7y ago
    The possibility to work part time with pro-rata pay is mandated by law in some countries under certain conditions (15+ employees,...) (i.e. Germany).
- lerpoel 7y ago
  Mandate 4 day weeks and see if salaries go down. I would guess not as companies still need to keep their workforce.
  - rayvd 7y ago
    What about those of us who want to work more than four days?
    - atom058 7y ago
      Some people work 6-7 days a week already. So if they're working under that arrangement now, it will probably be fine for them to work more than mandatory hours in the future also.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  i guess the idea is, considering how much worker productivity has improved over the decades, even working 4 days a week, one should still be able to survive just fine (at least that is my interpretation)
- kittko 7y ago
  Personal anecdota: it definitely seems like a huge part of the people in my city (Zurich) are working 80% (4-day week for 80% pay).
- JTbane 7y ago
  >>Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes. Uh, probably not. Unless you mean part-time work. Or 10 hour days.
b3n 7y ago
30 hours a day seems quite extreme to me.
- astonex 7y ago
  Well for starters, looking at the charts in the link 30 hours is still much more productive than the 40hr 1975 worker. As a programmer I'm not doing focused programming for any more than 30 hours a week anyway
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    You might be productive, but you can't produce 6 hours a day from nothing.
    - Mtinie 7y ago
      —— For immediate release. CERN is proud to announce it will resume LHC operations shortly after a major system sensitivity upgrade and is poised to launch a new set of tests on behalf of their corporate donors. This year marks the first time scientists will seek proof of the (not-yet-)theorized “anti-second”. According to the head of the program, Dr. Ismadeup: “When the efforts of our labors are successful, the rules of physics will fundamentally change! This discovery will allow corporate taskmasters and mindful spouses to extract even more productivity from those under their sway.” Athletic organizations, alcohol distributors, and adult media companies are eagerly awaiting the commercialization of any resulting technological enhancements derived from the research.
      - antisemiotic 7y ago
        Finally I can ditch the portable black hole I was using for work hour dilatation.
  - epaga 7y ago
    He was joking because you said 30 hours a day

HNcantBtrustd 7y ago

Living standards remained constant while productivity went up? Interesting. I have a multi color LED strip I'm looking at. Posting this on the internet from a smartphone in a far bigger house than a 1950s engineer, my car has worked for 12 years.... Here is a question, can we take this author seriously? Citations are nice, but it doesn't meet with reality. Why is this author proposing living standards are the same?

sravi2421 7y ago

Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising? And how does that compare to this rise in productivity? Until those two pieces get solved, productivity gains don't matter since everyone needs to produce/earn more to just get those basic needs fulfilled.

Razengan 7y ago
What is productivity?
- LeonB 7y ago
  For some things it’s easy to measure: eg how much wheat is produced per hour of farm labor. Some easy to measure things don’t rise and it’s easy to see why, e.g. how many students does one teacher teach in a given day. Productivity in the aggregate is “the gross national” product and is calculated by the bureau of statistics. This is divided by the total number of hours worked. Must be a very big spreadsheet. :)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  GDP per labour hour.
jplayer01 7y ago
> Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising? But wait, part of the problem is that productivity growth has effectively decoupled from wage growth since the 70s (in the US, maybe the UK, and similar but not as drastic trends in other comparable Western countries). I find it odd that the article barely even mentions it in passing.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Are healthcare and education demponstrably multiple times better than in the 1950s? Are lifespans multiples of what they were in the 1950s? Are college graduates multiple times more intelligent than they were in the 1950s? Is housing multiple times better than what it was in the 1950s? Or are all these gatekeeping functions capturing rents?

bubbabojangles 7y ago

Perhaps if we were not handing over most of the productivity gains of society to CEOs, the rest of us would not need to work so many hours. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

chrstphrhrt 7y ago
What really gets me about this as a sometimes-entrepreneur, is that management is not even taking personal risks. Besides narrow cases of torts and their need to have fiduciary duties, they are no different from other staff workers.

firepoet 7y ago

The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.

tc7 7y ago
Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case. I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)
- vlan0 7y ago
  Maybe? I know I make about the same as my uncle did working for Ernst & Young (in DC) during the late 90s early 2000s. However, neither of us were/are in development.
- nabnob 7y ago
  I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambda-school-raised-30m-to-expand-its-income-sharing-tuition-plan-for-online-coding-students/#278dcfe02c68 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambd...
- zanny 7y ago
  There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo. And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create. Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune. So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.

d4nt 7y ago

I think many people would work less if they could afford to. But we're not getting paid for all this extra productivity[1]. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/#279de59b7342 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...

knightofmars 7y ago
Ah yes, Tim Worstall. Every time I read one of his articles I end up thinking, "He touched on this important related aspect of his topic but then failed to actually detail how it impacts his claim, both for and against." I this article, he mentions "total compensation" includes benefits and suggests that those benefits somehow make up the missing wages. From a pure numbers perspective, the increase in benefits is an increase in total compensation. But it doesn't call out that most of those "missing wages" have been absorbed into handle rising healthcare costs. The people who are receiving these "increased benefits" haven't received anything other than the same healthcare but now they pay more for it.

UglyToad 7y ago

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll leave software for good. Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it doesn't scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office / scrum) you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time. It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted. I meet software developers who advocate for, or don't mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days and I simply don't understand it, it's alien to me. Are they being productive all that time? Edit: to clarify (since I've posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5 hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Yeah, I also see this issue. It's made worse by Agile/Scrum that assumes during the planning poker meeting that every dev has 8 hours per day available of constant flow while the real value being maybe 5-6 if you're lucky so you end up cutting corners or burned out due to the stress of meeting the target velocity.
- Lewton 7y ago
  Not an inherent agile/scrum problem, we assume 6 hours availability per day during planning in my team
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    Which is still about 3 more than reality
  - Chris2048 7y ago

Lynbarry 7y ago

I reduced my time at work to 80% at the beginning of July. Every Friday is my day now. This week I had to switch it up so today is my day off. It's 1pm and I have already worked out, ran some errands that had been bugging me and am now reading this in one of my favorite diners which I for some reason almost never found the time to go to before. If you have the chance and it seems intriguing to you I encourage everyone to try it out. I guess not all workplaces support it in the same way as mine does, but it was possible for me to have a three month trial phase after which I can go back to 100% or decide to continue the 80% for a year. Maybe your workplace would be open for that but you just don't know! Of course it's quite the pay cut, but as a developer with few obligations I can still manage quite well. I feel much more relaxed over all and I enjoy my work more when I'm there. It even subjectively feels like I'm getting more done at work. The weekend feels so much longer and relaxing, because stuff I normally do on the weekend often is already done. One problem for me is that I tend to cram a lot into my Fridays. I feel like I have to use them to their full potential. Then when the weather doesn't work out or something else falls through I'm pretty bummed. But I think that is something that can be improved over time.

glormph 7y ago
This sounds awesome. I'm held back a bit, I have always been warned against working less than a full workweek, since it would presumely substantially harm my (European) retirement build-up (unless I would make a lot more money than I currently do). I have never investigated yet, but would before cutting working hours.
VBprogrammer 7y ago
It's certainly something I'd love to trial. I think most people probably look at their take home pay and imagine that taking 20% off of that figure would be a big cut. In the UK at least, as a higher-rate tax payer (40% tax) it wouldn't be nearly as bad as that seems. At the moment we're looking at nursery for our 7 month old 2 days per week. If instead I could work 4 days a week it would be a wash financially. I'd get the benefits of spending more time with her but obviously looking after a < 1 year old isn't 'a day off' by any stretch.
diveloper 7y ago

Majromax 7y ago

Unfortunately, the mid-noughts vintage of this page is showing. After about 2010, productivity growth has not kept up with the page's 1.7% estimate (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn). Also, this page neglects the influence of heterogeneous productivity changes. Some fields don't experience the same kind of productivity growth that we've seen in manufacturing (and services aided by technology); for example a doctor now is not seeing four times as many patients as a doctor in 1940. A barber now is not cutting the hair of four people at once. You can't productivity-gain your way out of the costs of dedicated attention from individuals.

jswet 7y ago

“Productivity” means something very different for assembly line workers than it does for retail workers. As productivity has improved over time, we actually have seen the expected reduction of hours, but it varies by occupation. A much smaller number of people work in manufacturing now, while the ranks of retail and white collar workers have grown. People are moving towards occupations where “productivity” is harder to gauge and not necessarily the most important metric at all times. The increase in productivity in some sectors and the migration of workers to new sectors are broadly related, too, since the former requires technological advance, which is the result of cognitive work and creates more need for white collar and cognitive work.

Expez 7y ago

I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work 4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so this works out well. It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90% of them were completely pointless) as well as take more breaks for stuff like hn. I'd guess that I'm producing about 90% of the value I used to, but putting in way less hours. This isn't a bad deal for my employer, I think. The pay cut kind of sucks, but I'm still making the national median salary because developers are paid so generously. A lot of people opt to take whole days off, when they work less hours, but I find this arrangement works much better for me. It gives me more time for hobbies, friends and family, working out, eating healthy etc in the day-to-day.

Whygul 7y ago
Where do you work that gives you this option if you don't mind sharing a little more?
- tadzik_ 7y ago
  Not OP but I have a similar workstyle: I work half-time for one client (remotely), 4 hours a week for another (also remotely) and occasionally take side gigs like teaching or something. The remote work is mostly in Norway, I live in Poland, so the pay cut is not noticable – the fact that "I could be making twice as much if I worked “normally”" is something that always is in the back of my head, but is somewhat dimished by the fact that I still make more than a typical fulltime salary would net me here in Poland. Being a contractor in a niche technology (in my case it's Perl) is great for this, because the companies involved can't really say "work more or we'll find someone else" – we both know that they won't ;) Also, beyond 4-5 hours a day my (and afaik everyone else's) productivity is diminishing anyway, so it's not like they're losing much because of it.
- Expez 7y ago
  In-house product development of a SaaS platform. You can check out it out at ardoq.com. The company is imo a great place to work, but this is also in Norway where it's pretty common for people (usually older ones, though) to work 80 or 60%. That probably made this a lot more likely to happen. I'll add that there was some fear that everyone else would want the same arrangement and that we'd suddenly only have devs working part time, but nobody else has expressed any interest in this. Different strokes for different folks...

amiga_500 7y ago

People aren’t motivated because work is an endless treadmill. Financial independence a roll of the loaded startup dice. The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just the rich, like YC VCs. All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus value.

mlevental 7y ago
you're going to get downvoted the all the protestant work ethic people that think labor is virtuous per se - "an honest day's work is reward in and of itself" type thing (forgetting or conveniently omitting that these values/virtues were defined by capital not labor). I agree with you and many more would too if they didn't see themselves as "temporarily aggrieved millionaires".
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  As Iain Banks put it his The Culture universe, "money is a sign of poverty". We're hopefully still in the tricky beginning of a transition phase to a post-scarcity civilization. Just need that fusion reactor to start with...

sweeneyrod 7y ago

> The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week. The logical conclusion from this seems to me to be "productivity doesn't mean anything". If we all have four times as much stuff as in 1950 (rather than working fewer hours) then where is it? Obviously there have been a lot of amazing technological developments since the fifties but most of them aren't that expensive: if you sold your computer/phone/etc. you wouldn't be four times richer.

coldtea 7y ago

Someone wrote here about whether 3 hours or so out of 8 being productive "is not just peculiar to software work. There's an old post from a photographer blogger and funny guy if somewhat controversial [1]: > The Two-Hour Rule is a law of American business which states that "no salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed two hours of actual work in any business day." > The Two-Hour Rule does not apply to government workers (police, fire, military, libraries, public works, etc.), independent contractors, services billed hourly or apply outside the USA. I'll cover these at the end. The Two-Hour Rule applies to people working at government subcontractors because they are businesses. > The Two-Hour Rule was created to ensure that American business thrived on efficiency, not on dumb hard work, so that Americans could enjoy the lives they had earned." https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm [1] Naive amateurs with religious feels about photography and its "rules" tend to hate him, for such advice as "just shoot JPEG" (as if shooting RAW, and squeezing that extra quality is not a tradeoff of file size/storage/post processing, but a holy duty of everyone who photographs, even if it's just BS family/travel/pet pics nobody would ever really care about - not even the family/pet).

Palomides 7y ago
this fits in really well with https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... , thanks for sharing, I think it's very useful to get these alternate perspectives on the corporate grind
raihansaputra 7y ago
I was an avid reader of his blog, but never read that. Genius. On the footnote: reading his advice over and over again made me a better photographer. I still shoot RAW, as I like editing, but his advice on just sticking with AUTO is what made me far more productive rather that fiddling with trying to get the best shutter speed/aperture.

youareostriches 7y ago

Working fewer hours is absolutely required as a practice of degrowth to reduce CO2 emissions and limit ecosystem damage.

muzani 7y ago

Tech actually seems really optimal for this. I get assigned a 8 hour task. I spend 4 hours trying to get it done in 4 hours. The next time I get the same task, it takes 4 hours. I can optimize it even further if it happens a lot, get it done in 10 minutes. I can 'siphon off' time this way, lowering estimates a little, cutting time spent by a lot, then basically reinvesting the saved time into rest or productivity. The other day we had a meeting; I got all the work done before the meeting ended then waited an hour before showing the result. There are lots of tricks, like figuring out keyboard shortcuts, IDE plugins, or simply refactoring staging/production builds into a single button. It's surprising how much mental effort and time a shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + F saves. The long term goal is to be so productive that I can probably negotiate a shorter work week or more vacation days instead of a raise, as I already get paid a comfortable amount.

tacostakohashi 7y ago
You can absolutely do that to a huge extent, but good luck actually capturing the productivity gains as an employee. You won't be rewarded with shorter days or salary increases, certainly not in proportion to your productivity increases. At best, you can use the siphoned off time for learning new things, or networking your way into management. Employers don't value that kind of thing, possibly because although it increases your efficiency, it also leads to a complicated, brittle environment that is difficult to scale to many employees, and staff that are less interchange and harder to replace.

scottlocklin 7y ago

Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary? Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're not measuring the right things. If the bare rudiments; food, housing, family creation cost the same or more, but we claim productivity has increased because ... I dunno we can sit on our fat asses and watch netflix instead of going to a movie theater: that's not measuring the right things. Edit add: even assuming all the productivity gains have only benefitted, say, the top 10%, you'd see more people who could buy a house and make a family working 10 hours a week.

zackmorris 7y ago
It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem. We could have automated things like solar energy production in the early 80s but the powers that be said no. We could have done similar things with mass transit, or organic farming, or wireless telecommunications, but that top 10% with all the money kept saying no. So here we are decades later still paying for the long term costs of technical debt in our economy. The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. Planning and zoning put homes too far away from workplaces. Houses are still built of wood 2x4s instead of recycled materials. Heck, we still build homes mostly by hand. Not to mention that land prices are hyper inflated due to the age old power imbalance between land owners and plebeians. We're basically living in the 1999 economy from the Matrix movies 20 years later. I think it's either going to take a mainstream movement towards some of the democratic socialism ideas from Europe or organizing on a mass scale to solve these problems. Unfortunately politicians and the elite will do everything in their power to stop real progress like that, until (like with solar) it becomes cheap enough that it can be rolled out without government incentives.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you there are political problems, but this is a measurement problem. >The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. If productivity had truly quadrupled since 1950, it doesn't matter what the externalities of homes are; not even the fact that they're still made by hand. If it takes X worth of labor and materials to build a house at t0 and t1 and societal productivity has gone from y to 4y between t0 and t1, there should be some large fraction of the population at t1 who can afford a house on 1/4 of t0 hours. There isn't. You can't even say that modern houses are better in any sense than 1950s houses; they mostly are not (energy efficiency maybe; even that is dubious). I think the thing we have to come to accept as a society is that productivity and efficiency increases are a mirage.

perfunctory 7y ago

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. -- John Maynard Keynes http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

akavi 7y ago

It's a little odd that the link doesn't mention that average working hours has in fact gone down over time in the United States, from 1989 hours over a year in 1950 to 1,757 hours in 2017[0]. That's a decrease of roughly 12%. Not as much as if all of productivity increases had gone into increasing leisure, but I'm not sure you'd expect that to have happened. This trend seems fairly robust across countries and extending even further back in time. The average work week in the USA was 62 hours in 1870, and was 40.25 hours in 2000, a decline of 29% [1]. My suspicion is that this actually understates the increase in leisure time, as many household chores are presumably easier due to modern tech. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-working-hours-per-year-after-the-industrial-revolution https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-work...

ale22 7y ago

I think we need to limit the labor pool size to increase the bargaining position of employees. As far as US is concerned, that means, limiting immigration numbers.

wazoox 7y ago

Do you know why work is so much more productive? Because so much is automated away, and relies on machines. Each and every worker works using lots of machines. Of course, the more machines you can make work the more productivity you have. When a large part of your work can't be delegated to machines, for instance nursing a baby, talking to people face to face, etc (mostly "human relations" things) then your productivity can't augment as much. This is also why "human work" earns less than "things work". Do you know what machines use to work? Energy. In the end, energy availability is the ultimate constraint. Good old thermodynamics. Why can't anything grow forever (and surely not GDP)? because of available energy, and thermodynamics.

twodave 7y ago

My work/life balance has changed a lot in the last 5 or so years. I've done all of the above (in chronological order): FTE 100% in the office FTE 100% remote (same company, living in the same city) FT Contract on-site plus consulting FT Contract on-site minus consulting FTE 100% remote (HQ 4-5 hour drive away, quarterly-ish visits) FTE 100% on-site FTE* "wherever" plus 10-15 hours/wk consulting Right now I'm a FTE at one place where I probably _actually_ spend about 35 hours/week working and then I am on monthly retainer for my old employer (through my consulting corp). I wake up before 6 most mornings and either put in a few consulting hours or go do crossfit. Then 9-noonish I try and be productive at my full-time job. I usually a long lunch/run errands after that, and then a couple more hours for the full-time job in the afternoon. I'm usually done working by 4:30 or 5pm and then it's time to either cook or go to the in-laws or order food depending on how I feel (I'm the cook and we're a family of 6). I have found the variety of doing multiple jobs keeps me much more productive in general, because I can basically work on what I want whenever I'm motivated to. The end of the month/sprint can be rough sometimes if I have procrastinated (or just not felt motivated at one job or the other), but every month when I get a check in the mail I feel freshly motivated haha.

nbrempel 7y ago

The number of times this topic has come up on HN recently is really surprising. It seems 1 or 2 posts on this topic hit the front page just about every day. I run a newsletter and job board called 30 Hour Jobs [1] – I started the project about 6 months ago and it seems like my timing couldn't have been any better. Usually, I try not to shamelessly plug my own projects too often but I can't help but share it in the comments when the topic is so relevant! [1] https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com

KineticLensman 7y ago

I do a three day week with a corresponding pay cut. Incidentally, this puts me in the same position, time-wise, as women returning from maternity leave, so the shorter hours don't mark me out particularly. My co-workers are fine with it, and if a surge is needed, I can work longer weeks and accrue Time Off In Lieu. There is no way that I would go back to a routine five day week. I'm doing this to prep for the more significant transition of fully retiring, so that I don't hit the cliff edge of going from full-time to nothing. Stopping work is still going to be a bit of a shock, but I genuinely feel part-time working is helping me to prepare for inevitable retirement.

soufron 7y ago

As a good tip, in order to keep my workweek short, I try not to work on Wednesday and Friday, and of course, on the week end. This means I try to work 3 days a week only. I usually can do it pretty much easily.

blunte 7y ago

Cost of living increases almost every year. Value of money decreases somewhat from inflation. Worker salaries have not been increasing on pace with inflation, much less cost of living increases, since oh... the Reagan years. What has increased dramatically since the Reagan years is executive pay and wealth of top 1%. What has also increased is consumer debt, particularly during the Clinton years. At the same time that consumer debt was increasing, interest rates (for consumers, not the prime rate) were climbing quickly to their legal limits. Also, those legal limits were occasionally being increased. Yes consumers are consuming more stuff, and yes most of that extra consumption is rather wasteful and provides decreasing benefit in terms of quality of life or happiness. But the rate of some consumption is going down. Modern computers, TVs, and even mobile phones now can do so much more than most users need that there is less and less reason to upgrade frequently. Buying a new car every couple of years is a great way to waste money. But generally speaking, "the people" aren't living larger than they did 20-30 years ago. There's very little doubt that the vast majority of the value of the increased productivity output has gone to the top 1%. That's factually visible even without exposing the many sources of hidden offshore wealth that is sometimes estimated to be multiple times larger than the known wealth.

franciscop 7y ago

I want to note that there's something that has been rarely mentioned in these threads and I wonder why: longer education time (and earlier retirement). On my parents generation a small percentage of people went to university, and on my grandparents generation most people started working on their early teens (post-war, I'm from Spain). In contrast, today having an undergraduate degree is very common, and a master or even doctorate is no rare. This makes a 10-15 year difference of no-work time to our lives, which is ~1/4th of our work lives. Where before we were expected to work from 16 to 66 years old (~50 years), now we are expected to work from 22 years old to 62 years old (40 years). Only this is a reduction of work by 20%, or a full work day. To add on top of that, our life expectancy has been increasing in all developed countries (except, USA). While this does not take away work time, it does add leisure time to our lives. To be clear, I agree with the article and sentiment here and we should be working shorter weeks. Only wanted to note this since many people seem to ignore it when discussing work week.

lbj 7y ago

Interestingly we did a survey such as this on our massive danish government and it turns out that since the 1950s there has been a 0% productivity increase, the wages have however followed increases in the private sector.

ulisesrmzroche 7y ago

We should be having official 4 hour workdays. State mandated. We can only do about four hours of solid work. There’s really no tricks to productivity. Just trying to mask fatigue, I suppose. But me? I don’t do any real work until after lunch. Maybe a meeting, to manage my managers, of course. I learned this just in recent years tho. Before that, I was as neurotic as anyone.