7 ms·
Spanish schedules are downright weird (2016)
- irrational 6y agoDo all levels of school also start late in the morning?
- dmarcos 6y agoNo, I did all my education in Spain and starting time was 8-9am with a 1-3pm lunch break. About half of the kids going home for lunch and back to school.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago2 hours?
- projektfu 6y agoSpain is somewhat famous for the Siesta, a long lunch and nap break.
- brnt 6y agoIt's normal in France too (12-2pm).
- leesalminen 6y agoChile as well.
- dmarcos 6y agoNo siesta. Commute and some do homework during that time. Kids with both parents working stay at school cantine and lunch break is socializing / sports. I used play basketball during that time.
- projektfu 6y agoApparently an offensive comment?
- pvaldes 6y agoNah. Would be not much different than saying that US is famous for their gallant parties and great cotton fields harvested by singing black slaves (and repeating that again and again each time you talk about US). It just feels stupid currently.
- t-writescode 6y ago... are you really comparing the righteous outrage someone would have over saying Americans are slave owners to ... saying people like to take afternoon naps?
- pvaldes 6y agoIs just an example. But could be an accurate comparison, yes Repeatedly calling all the people in a country as lazy and unproductive is not an innocent move. Is parroting the racist slogans what other people said since decades whereas choosing to be blind to the easily verifiable facts. Therefore can be traced easily to drink from the same racist fountains, even if is of a soft, non-conscious type. Dehumanization is a necessary previous step for racism. From there is easily escalated to "they don't deserve it" and "they must be punished for it" and to "he tried to resist and I don't care if this hispanic scum can breathe (because in my mind is just a parasite)". Can you see the pattern? Lots of people in Spain are as white as the whitest people that you can find in USA. I guarantee that you couldn't guess in photos by their look, who will be classified as "hispanic" and who will be classified as "white/caucasian" in the frontier.
- t-writescode 6y ago> Repeatedly calling all the people in country as lazy and unproductive is not an innocent move I would consider a nap in the middle of the day far from laziness, but an enabler of great productivity. I'm (edit: covetous) of siestas.
- pvaldes 6y agoYou have an outdated image of the country, like 200 years outdated, or so...
- ghostDancer 6y agoIt's not because siesta, that's mostly a legend. In Spain lunch is a big meal, the biggest of the day. Add to that the children going home and coming back to school .
- pvaldes 6y agoThis is also a difference, breakfast in Spain is typically a short event.
- runawaybottle 6y agoAny correlation between life expectancy and levels of depression across those countries?
- josu 6y agoToo many confounders.
- pkaye 6y agoNow we need to seen the programmer schedule around the world! I don't think I start before 10am.
- recursive 6y agoAnother programmer data point: I live in the US, and rarely start after 8am.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoI worked in Germany and now Austria and in both countries most locals would already be at the office and coding at 7:30 while I would still be in bed. It might have something to do with short schedules of Austrian businesses which meant that if you go with 9:00-5:30 work schedule by the time you finished work the shops would be almost closed so you learn to optimize for early in the office, early out the office.
- de_watcher 6y agoThe natural programmer's schedule is around 30 hours so it constantly slips relative to the day cycle.
- seisvelas 6y agoNothing has ever rung truer for me than this comment. I've battled against this almost my entire life. Now that I'm working from home I still keep a basic schedule that involves waking up in the morning and not totally drifting. But having the slack to drift around a little has massively improved my quality of life. I had no idea this was common for programmers. Is there any evidence to back up your claim, other than our two points of anecdata?
- bboreham 6y agoI worked with a guy who lived on a 28-hour schedule; 6 days to the week. He swore this suited his natural body clock. It was quite difficult to figure out when you’d see him in work next.
- oftenwrong 6y agoRelevant: How much is time wrong around the world? http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/ http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t... or, if you just want to see the map: http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV2.png http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...
- freefrancisco 6y agoSkip breakfast, intermittent fasting eating window between 2 pm and 8 pm, fun lifestyle, and lots of sun, No wonder they are expected to be the top life expectancy country! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-japan-2040-world-life-expectancy-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...
- renw0rp 6y agoYou got the eating pattern a bit wrong; 9-10pm they are just leaving home to eat out; at least in Andalusia
- dsiegel2275 6y agoI saw the same thing in Asturias and Galicia when we visited there last year. Very late dinners indeed - even families with young children out eating dinner that late.
- sixQuarks 6y agoIf you think Spain schedules are weird, you should see Argentina's. You go to a restaurant at 9:30pm and you're one of the early birds.
- polymeris 6y agoChile is even worse, at least in terms of clock time, since, like Argentina, we are on UTC-3 most of the year, when geographically we should be on -5.
- projektfu 6y agoI live in the western end of the Eastern Time Zone in the US and I know this phenomenon well. The sun rises later and everyone has a harder time getting up in the morning. Compared to New England, where they naturally arise earlier because the sun rises much earlier.
- Xcelerate 6y agoInteresting that so many people eat lunch late. I skip breakfast, each lunch at 11 AM, and then dinner is normally around 6 PM.
- chinesempire 6y agothat's a kid schedule where I come from, they love their snacks, but hate having "grown ups" meal schedules. I'm saying it without any kind of judgement.
- Xcelerate 6y agoThere’s two reasons why I eat this way. The first is that I think intermittent fasting is probably beneficial in terms of preventing too many calories, and I also seem to focus much better when I’m slightly hungry. The morning is when I get the bulk of my work that requires deep focus completed, and the few times I have eaten breakfast I’ve felt lethargic and unfocused afterward. The second reason is that I’ve really gotten into cooking, and dinner can take 3 hours (sometimes more) to prepare. Three meals a day is too much when one of them takes so much time.
- sk0g 6y agoSame, that makes two of us kids then! I typically have a smoothie or sandwiches or something easy and lazy between 11-12, and then when the girlfriend's home and it makes sense to cook, one of us cooks up a storm, or we eat last night's leftovers (there's rarely any!) and have dinner at 7 ish. She does like her breakfast though, and apparently I'm the odd one out for this eating schedule.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago0 min commute? 0 min shower? There must be something wrong here.
- polymeris 6y agoSince it took me a while to find the original article: https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/1458309794_132930.html https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2016/03/18/articulo/145830979...
- lokedhs 6y agoI'm Swedish, living in Singapore and the spanish time table looks like the one I've followed all my life (both in Sweden and in Singapore). I'd argue that it's most of the other countries' schedules that are way too early. They're mostly based on 19'th century farming schedules which most people don't follow anymore.
- dehrmann 6y agoThe Swedish one doesn't include fika, so it's obviously wrong. Singapore is interesting because afternoons are pretty hot, so people take advantage of evenings more.
- paulmooreparks 6y agoTrue. Every evening here is practically perfect, anyway.
- paulmooreparks 6y agoI also live in Singapore. I just remarked to my wife, "Hey, we're practically Spanish!" We keep a similar schedule, especially with the lockdo... er, "circuit breaker." Interesting that Singapore is also a bit off from its natural time zone.
- skrause 6y agoSolar noon in Madrid is around 1 hour and 10 minutes later than in Berlin, yet they both use the same time zone. This is how it would look if you gave Spain a time zone where solar noon would be around 12 (winter time) just like Berlin and Spanish people would keep their rhythm relative to actual daylight: https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png https://i.imgur.com/u01l47S.png (I've shifted Spain up by a bit more than one hour).
- sbassi 6y agothe timetable shown in the article looks very similar to my experience in Argentina. And in the inner part of the country, there is even nap (siesta) after lunch.
- harryf 6y ago> “Around 46% of Spaniards are still at work at 6pm, and 10% are still there at 9pm,” says Berbel. “So they are not having a good time, they are working.” Reminds me when I moved from the UK to Germany (and later Switzerland) and was blown away, in the German office I worked in, how they worked less hours (most people strictly 8am to 4pm) and were at least a factor of 5 times more productive than anything I'd experienced in the UK. The typical "average working day" I witnessed in a number of UK companies in London (I was an IT freelancer back in the mid-to-late 90's) went like... - Arrive 9am-ish (depending on the Tube) - Drink coffee, talk about football, what was on TV last night and whatever funny thing happened at the pub last night and basically almost no work until... - 12 noon... time to get something done for an hour before lunch - Lunch for 1 - 1.5 hours... some people already drinking their first beer - Get back from lunch, pretend to work while being half asleep from a large lunch - 4pm something's on fire... big crisis! Gotta be fixed NOW - 8-9pm... fire now extinguished. Leave to the pub with colleagues That's slanted toward an IT department but from what was basically 12 hours of being at work in some work, there was probably only 4-5 hours of productivity. The key difference I witnessed in Germany was people went to work to work, not to socialise, and were actually getting more done in less time. There was also a bias towards being pro-active over being re-active, which meant less fire-fighting, which in turn meant time could be better managed.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoHuh, funny enough, a guy I worked with in Germany had a similar experience but felt very different about it. He disliked the strict 8 hours/day(or more during crunch time) butt-in-chair concentrated German work ethic that left him(and me) mentally spent and tired by the end of the day and moved to the UK where, despite the usual putting out fires before a release was due, he gets paid more and can come at work close to 10AM and leave before 4PM while not doing much work most of the time leaving him plenty of energy for fun in the evening and saying he'll never go back to working in Germany. Can't say I don't envy him. I mean, is life about being as productive as you can for someone else or for enjoying it yourself? Maybe the Brits have it right.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
- mratsim 6y agoThe French schedule is only half the population, the one at 35 hours/week, but many have more hours: - Lunch is often 2 hours for "white collar" workers - Plenty of people start at around 9~9:30AM and finish work at 7:30PM~8PM Also regarding dinner it starts at 8 for many.
- econcon 6y agoI've always eaten at 2pm lunch and 8pm dinner. No snacks, no tea, no coffee. Only water to quench thrist. Having said that most of my work is technical in nature and I am a partime machinist. Basically, after completing my development work at 5pm - I work in my machine shop for an hour or two everyday.
- pvaldes 6y agoYawn... This came from here. Holland spreading the lazy southerners myth, again. In particular this stupid journal cover selling outrage and hate yesterday: https://imagenes.20minutos.es/files/article_default_content/uploads/imagenes/2020/05/28/elsevier-weekblad-revista-holandesa-con-portada-ofensiva-para-el-sur-de-europa.jpeg https://imagenes.20minutos.es/files/article_default_content/... I expected more from you, Elsevier. First, Spain is a touristic country. For some people this means strange schedules adapted to client requirements. Yes, some people start working at 21pm or later and works all night. This is totally normal in some sectors (Ask in las Vegas). Are they mixing all sectors and doing a productivity mean? Because that would be stoopid. It seems that if a spaniard works at 20h pm (day) is strange, but a norwegian working at 16pm in winter (pitch black), is correct. Why? Every single country adapts their activity to the climate, not otherwise.
- chinesempire 6y ago> This came from here. Holland spreading the lazy southerners myth, again. Really? Again?!?! Should we talk about Holland laundering crime money then? https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/13/money-launderers-annually-wash-eu13-billion-netherlands https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/13/money-launderers-annually-wash...
- chinesempire 6y agoI guess our orange friends don't like when you tell them their country is basically a tax heaven for organized crime ... "We definitely have the characteristics of a narco-state," confides Jan Struijs, chairman of the biggest Dutch police union. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50821542 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50821542
- dang 6y agoNationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. No more of this please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- chinesempire 6y agoItalian here, from Rome. Those "weird" Spanish Schedules are my schedules. I rarely have breakfast before 9:30, I rarely have lunch before 14:00 and dinner before 20:30. Except for breakfast (I am not a morning person, never been) I learned my schedules from my family, a normal working class family, with regular schedules, same as many other families around us. I guess we are weird too.