9 ms·

Unpopular opinion: Weekdays/weekend split isn't for everyone

62 points by mese848 6y ago

02020202 6y ago
we're still using 8 hour work days, now that's what i call retarded.
colmvp 6y ago
I tend to agree. There are some days in the week when I'm not checked in mentally and very unproductive. During those days, I'm better served to either sleep more or do something light to recharge for the next day/later in the week. And then there are some days including the weekend where I can code for the entire day non-stop and feel energetic. I still think having standardized days for working and rest is best for the sake of having multiple hours of operation overlap (e.g. schools, most businesses and government operations).
- amelius 6y ago
  But perhaps you feel energetic during the weekend because there is less pressure. Or less distraction. If we standardize on seven day work-weeks then some of those benefits may be gone.
- User23 6y ago
  When I was at Big Tech Company I would just tell my boss if I was having one of those days and make it up on the weekend rather than using PTO. It was never a problem. It's amazing how much a good professional relationship with management helps.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm not sure what issue people have with this statement. Sure, if you have collaborative work you need to do that you're just going to blow off. But in general? There have been a number of times in the current situation where it's been a nice day and the weekend has a lousy forecast and I didn't have any meetings or only had them in the morning. I've just told my manager I'm taking the afternoon off and would make it up on Saturday. TBH, I didn't even really need to ask. I'm not sure why this would be controversial.
skohan 6y ago
I currently work a 4 day week with Wednesdays off and it's like magic
- ghaff 6y ago
  And to show how much of this is personal, during normal times, I'd consider a singleton day in the middle of the week an incredible waste relative to 3-day weekend (or even better a 4-day weekend once every two weeks) so that I could travel places.
  - skohan 6y ago
    The Wednesday off is not so bad for this; 2 vacation days and you're looking at a 5 day holiday
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Sure, any arbitrary day off can be bridged to a weekend using vacation days. But normally I overwhelmingly use my vacation time for week or multi-week trips plus maybe some days around business travel.
    - Freak_NL 6y ago
      That goes for any weekday though, so not really a benefit except that you can have a five day holiday with only two extra days off that can include any specific weekday in it, but this holds true for Monday and Friday as the fixed day off as well. Only if you have Tuesdays and Thursdays off you won't be able to get a contiguous five day holiday with only two days extra off that can include any weekday (e.g., with a fixed Thursday off, you can't include Tuesday in your five day block without taking a third extra day off). My wife and I both work four days a week and have Fridays off. It makes it much easier to get into the weekend mindset.
      - skohan 6y ago
        Yeah the best thing about Wednesday for me is that you can only accumulate so much stress in 2 days
tolbish 6y ago
That is an unpopular opinion in the same way that saying "The 40 hour work week isn't for everyone" is an unpopular opinion.
- User23 6y ago
  Especially since it's observably true that for knowledge workers, almost nobody actually spends even close to a full percentage of their work hours doing the work in their job description. The productivity loss from requiring say 30 hours a week a week instead of 40 would be significantly less than a 25% decrease. In fact I wouldn't bet against a gain in total productivity.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    I've been furloughed down to 32 hours a week for 5 months (mostly taking 3 day weekends). It has had a noticeable (downward) impact on tempo, but we aren't necessary looking for ways to make it the permanent way to organize the week either. It would be hard to sell me on taking Wednesday off, but I can see where people with more obligations would get a lot out of an arrangement like that.
    - watwut 6y ago
      I think you get more gain if you lower amount of hours per day rather then skip a day. Skipping a day is more comfortable for people who want free day.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I suspect that if I technically worked 6 hours a day it wouldn't make much difference. I already have a pretty flexible schedule and, like most people, it's not like I'm heads-down 8 hours a day. On the other hand, lop a full day off a week and, while I'd shift some work as I do when I'm traveling, I'd do fewer things.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if % of effective hours remained the same, regardless if you are working 40 or 30 hours a week. I especially doubt it would increase total productivity, I could accept that it would improve efficiency. Any short term study will observe effects of people wanting to "reward" shorter working week and aren't really representative. This type of change needs a long "stealth" study period.
maxerickson 6y ago
It's pretty edgy to cast 'isn't for everyone' as an unpopular opinion. Only a very small group of people are going to have a strong opinion about how other people should organize their work life. They mostly won't care. I suppose lots of managers will be in that group, but work is organized around weekends for lots of non-arbitrary reasons.
Zhyl 6y ago
This was the topic of a video [0] posted by CGP Grey on the 25th August. Not mainstream, but I think the idea has been popular for a while [1]. >6.4 >A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot. >So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw [1] https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
- marketingPro 6y ago
  Of course people want flexibility, but there are cons- >Much more difficult for collaboration especially for small questions >Bad workers exploring nice policies Pros- >I can sleep/think about code without being paid. Making my solutions lower cost and higher quality >Happier employees >Potentially less micro management needed
  - ardit33 6y ago
    You can make 1pm to 5pm as mandatory, so both the 9-5 folks and 1pm to 9pm folks have some overlap for synchronization, meetings and such. As for people exploiting it, you should measure relative performance and not but time One of my first startups I worked had a noon-4pm core hours. You had to be in by noon, and should stay until 4pm, the rest was flexible. I thought it worked really well for both early risers and late owls.
    - Taylor_OD 6y ago
      12-3 is what I prefer for mandatory hours. I'm still going to see you if you are a 6am early bird.
    - jniedrauer 6y ago
      > you should measure relative performance This is also easier said than done. How do you measure programmer performance? LOC is obviously not a reasonable metric. Closed tickets isn't either. It takes an experienced manager who understands code to understand what work is actually being done, and managers like that are rare and valuable.
mkl95 6y ago
I worked for a startup that had an internal "story point meter" that would go up as you closed your tickets. The goal was to pressure employees into completing a certain number of story points per week the CEO considered a good number for a productive employee. Needless to say, this didn't work as intended, and the workforce was split between those who didn't care about it (higher ups) and those who maxed up their meter by overestimating their tasks' story points.
- steelframe 6y ago
  As a software engineering manager, I put a story-point-based method of task size estimation and team velocity measurement in place about two years ago. A stipulation of this was that at no time would any one developer have their story point velocity assessed. The purpose of this system is to provide the team with a powerful tool that it needs in order to set a realistic timeline on team deliverables, such as a launch milestone or a new feature. The ability of the story point methodology to have predictive power is destroyed when people are incentivized to gamify it.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    I’d argue the predictive power of story point methodology has not been established. There are simply too many variables to make estimates more accurate than “best guess”: 1/ the team’s composition at a point in time (and all the variability that comes with this) 2/ the team’s dependencies (a kind of exponential effect is at work here: the team’s dependencies also have all these issues in variability and so do their dependencies) 3/ the type of work being estimated in the context of the product (even “basic” things like “CRUD” can be quite intricate in some cases) Basically unless the estimation is literally for a known change (e.g. modify source code files X, Y and Z with code changes A, B, and C) its predictive power diminishes substantially. It’s not a powerful tool, it’s a micromanagement technique disguised as a tool to empower ICs.
    - steelframe 6y ago
      I completely agree with the impact of the variables you listed. However it's often the case that you need a starting point to estimate timelines. It's never acceptable to tell the decision makers, "We really have no idea how long this will take." Nor is it acceptable to say, "Sure, we'll have it ready in <licked finger in the wind> 8 weeks! Everyone get to work and make that happen (or else)!" Having a concrete plan ("micromanagement?") for getting to the finish line is important, and the story point methodology is an intuitive tool for figuring out what lengths the tasks need to start out with on the timeline.
docdeek 6y ago
Absolutely agree but it would be darn hard to manage with kids. I might be more productive on a Saturday than on a Tuesday, but hard to explain to the kids that you'll miss half the weekend because I wrote better on Saturdays than on Tuesdays.
- the__alchemist 6y ago
  This is one of the bigger effects of the general downside that social interactions may become difficult, depending on your circles.
- Jabbles 6y ago
  Well you don't need to optimize for productivity, you can optimize for enjoyment, stress-levels, ability to do admin. And presumably on Tuesday you would have the energy to do something fun with your kids. Also, huge numbers of people have to work at the weekends. From highly-paid doctors to fast-food employees. Presumably their kids understand.
  - docdeek 6y ago
    I guess the point is that schools aren't going to adapt to a schedule that isn't Monday to Friday (at least where I live). Spending time with the kids on Tuesday is going to be about 8 hours less time than I could spend with them on a Saturday when they are always free. You're right that kids understand but it's far from ideal when their schedules are so firmly fixed M-F with weekends free.
kevinventullo 6y ago
I think this is something every grad student already knows.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dgaudet 6y ago
i would prefer sunny days off, and bad weather days for meetings.
- boulos 6y ago
  (Hi Dean!?) But how would you synchronize the poor weather days of Seattle with the nice days the Bay Area? Then again, it’s definitely something I miss from doing research at school. Nice day, go for a hike. Bad day, time to finally rerun those experiments. Sadly, I have way more meetings than those days...
  - dgaudet 6y ago
    yeah i dunno how people live in the PNW, i was totally depressed the 8 months i spent in vancouver BC! it would be kind of cool to have calendar software which has a "bad weather" feature: correlate the 10-day forecasts of the required attendees, and pick the least sunny timeslot. mind you i'd also want the software to keep track of how frequently i've hiked, because even a sunny day of meetings is OK after a couple days of hiking. gotta mix it up. i'm sure this bin-packing problem has a reasonable enough solution :)
awinder 6y ago
Beware of history when mucking with weekends: https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-labor-policy https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-lab...
- erikerikson 6y ago
  What are we to beware? Most of the discussion here is about how increase individual choices over work time. That article details how individual choices was eliminated to increase control over workers.
xwdv 6y ago
By prefixing a title with “Unpopular Opinion” an author is essentially applying for a license to say something unpopular and not get too criticized for it. This is cowardly, people should just state their opinions and be open to whatever reaction it spawns.
dqv 6y ago
Whenever I hear people propose "radical" ideas about work shifts and weekends, I always wonder how they expect it to work at e.g. nuclear power plants and 911 call centers. Most people, given the opportunity, would opt to take the day off whenever they felt like it and come in and leave work as they please. Creatives seem to propose these ideas as universal, but never give even a passing mention about work that is necessarily shift-based. The handwavy answer is "oh we'll incentivize that" or "oh we'll automate it so they don't have to do shift work!" They should just be honest and say that they want special privileges for work and aren't concerned about putting any further thought into it. Anyway, this tweet is really someone trying to turn the thought "I don't really like my work schedule"/"Some people don't like their work schedule" into something profound.
- chillacy 6y ago
  The author says "isn't for everyone", not "is for no one". Your point about 911 call centers is true, but the principle is just that the work schedule needs to mesh with the job role itself. E.g. restaurants have to be open for meal times, customer service needs to be around when customers are around.
- travmatt 6y ago
  I assumed this argument was restricted those industries that have 9-5 and weekends & holidays off as the status quo: most b2b and some b2c. I can see how this issue would come up for creatives though. Some jobs have their hours or shifts dictated by the complexities of the profession: for doctors and nurses, handing off patients to new caregivers can be complex and it’d be easy to lose information in the process: the marginal utility of keeping the same person in charge vs the marginal risk that they’re too tired and would make a mistake is something that’s being studied. For creatives, the 9-5 seems to be much more akin to a vestigial organ than a system driven by first principles.
- Volundr 6y ago
  Well, I can say as someone who supports flexible scheduling and has run a team that way it's not so much that I ignored or didn't think about jobs where it didn't work so much as different jobs have different requirements. I ran a team of software developers, system administrators, and a help desk. The software devs had near complete freedom of scheduling, the sysadmins had a little less, and the help desk had almost none since they needed to be there when the people they were helping were. Everyone had as much flexibility as their job allowed and it worked great. It sucked that the help desk didn't have the flexibility, but they understood why, and I tried to find ways to provide other perks. Plus on the flip side they'd never find themselves trying to resolve an outage at 1 in the morning on a Sunday.
franciscop 6y ago
I commented on this before and I will again. The popular alt schedule shared in a reply (Wed off) is great if your life's purpose is to maximize your work performance in detriment of personal time. That is, if you don't have a work-life balance already. It is not surprising then that people who try to maximize their work come with schedules that are worse for personal time. Instead, especially in our more privileged profession, you should be pacing yourself so that you are not utterly broken by Saturday. Then you can take a full two-days off and do whatever you want, there are so many more things you can do with a two-day off in a row that you cannot do with single days, from simple organizing dinners with friends to weekend getaways.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Wednesday off wouldn't be for me; I'd prefer long weekends. But comments about how Wednesday off is great because it limits the stress buildup in the course of a week really makes me think something is off. If things are so bad that you can only work two days straight before crashing, something's wrong.
DenisM 6y ago
On a tangent: I derive significant amount of guilty pleasure by slacking for a whole day mid-week. Much more than I do from a "proper" weekend. I believe that's because as time rolls we assign minor duties to ourselves for the weekend, and that weekend becomes just another time of work filled with worry and a sense of obligation. An unplanned day off, by contrast, has no duties. Now if only I could replicate the same sense of freedom on the regular weekend I would be the happiest man alive.
boulos 6y ago
I’m currently shifting my schedule to work Saturdays and take off Mondays (I don’t have children, and my partner is flexible). Before the pandemic, I tried to block off time for deep work by booking multiple hours on my calendar each day. The shift to Saturday has been mostly great. I get a full day of deep work when nobody else is willing to work (Saturday), and neither Monday nor Friday had meetings I cared much about. Being able to walk around on a Monday is way nicer during the pandemic. Again, I get that others can’t replicate it if they have other commitments — importantly, both partners would need to have this flexibility, and most children’s’ schools probably wouldn’t be up for it :). The main thing as many are highlighting below is about overlap (and predictability for recurring meetings). I mostly work with people in US/Pacific, but also US/Eastern and somewhat less often Europe (London and Warsaw) and Sydney. So that’s already unschedulable anyway. People have been reasonably receptive to “oh, I see, yes you don’t work that day” though a good chunk ask “Do you really work on Saturday?” (to which I not only really work on Saturday, I probably get the most useful things done on that day).

62 points by mese848 6y ago

02020202 6y ago

we're still using 8 hour work days, now that's what i call retarded.

I tend to agree. There are some days in the week when I'm not checked in mentally and very unproductive. During those days, I'm better served to either sleep more or do something light to recharge for the next day/later in the week. And then there are some days including the weekend where I can code for the entire day non-stop and feel energetic. I still think having standardized days for working and rest is best for the sake of having multiple hours of operation overlap (e.g. schools, most businesses and government operations).

amelius 6y ago
But perhaps you feel energetic during the weekend because there is less pressure. Or less distraction. If we standardize on seven day work-weeks then some of those benefits may be gone.
User23 6y ago
When I was at Big Tech Company I would just tell my boss if I was having one of those days and make it up on the weekend rather than using PTO. It was never a problem. It's amazing how much a good professional relationship with management helps.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'm not sure what issue people have with this statement. Sure, if you have collaborative work you need to do that you're just going to blow off. But in general? There have been a number of times in the current situation where it's been a nice day and the weekend has a lousy forecast and I didn't have any meetings or only had them in the morning. I've just told my manager I'm taking the afternoon off and would make it up on Saturday. TBH, I didn't even really need to ask. I'm not sure why this would be controversial.

skohan 6y ago

I currently work a 4 day week with Wednesdays off and it's like magic

ghaff 6y ago
And to show how much of this is personal, during normal times, I'd consider a singleton day in the middle of the week an incredible waste relative to 3-day weekend (or even better a 4-day weekend once every two weeks) so that I could travel places.
- skohan 6y ago
  The Wednesday off is not so bad for this; 2 vacation days and you're looking at a 5 day holiday
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Sure, any arbitrary day off can be bridged to a weekend using vacation days. But normally I overwhelmingly use my vacation time for week or multi-week trips plus maybe some days around business travel.
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    That goes for any weekday though, so not really a benefit except that you can have a five day holiday with only two extra days off that can include any specific weekday in it, but this holds true for Monday and Friday as the fixed day off as well. Only if you have Tuesdays and Thursdays off you won't be able to get a contiguous five day holiday with only two days extra off that can include any weekday (e.g., with a fixed Thursday off, you can't include Tuesday in your five day block without taking a third extra day off). My wife and I both work four days a week and have Fridays off. It makes it much easier to get into the weekend mindset.
    - skohan 6y ago
      Yeah the best thing about Wednesday for me is that you can only accumulate so much stress in 2 days

tolbish 6y ago

That is an unpopular opinion in the same way that saying "The 40 hour work week isn't for everyone" is an unpopular opinion.

User23 6y ago
Especially since it's observably true that for knowledge workers, almost nobody actually spends even close to a full percentage of their work hours doing the work in their job description. The productivity loss from requiring say 30 hours a week a week instead of 40 would be significantly less than a 25% decrease. In fact I wouldn't bet against a gain in total productivity.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  I've been furloughed down to 32 hours a week for 5 months (mostly taking 3 day weekends). It has had a noticeable (downward) impact on tempo, but we aren't necessary looking for ways to make it the permanent way to organize the week either. It would be hard to sell me on taking Wednesday off, but I can see where people with more obligations would get a lot out of an arrangement like that.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I think you get more gain if you lower amount of hours per day rather then skip a day. Skipping a day is more comfortable for people who want free day.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I suspect that if I technically worked 6 hours a day it wouldn't make much difference. I already have a pretty flexible schedule and, like most people, it's not like I'm heads-down 8 hours a day. On the other hand, lop a full day off a week and, while I'd shift some work as I do when I'm traveling, I'd do fewer things.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if % of effective hours remained the same, regardless if you are working 40 or 30 hours a week. I especially doubt it would increase total productivity, I could accept that it would improve efficiency. Any short term study will observe effects of people wanting to "reward" shorter working week and aren't really representative. This type of change needs a long "stealth" study period.

maxerickson 6y ago

It's pretty edgy to cast 'isn't for everyone' as an unpopular opinion. Only a very small group of people are going to have a strong opinion about how other people should organize their work life. They mostly won't care. I suppose lots of managers will be in that group, but work is organized around weekends for lots of non-arbitrary reasons.

Zhyl 6y ago

This was the topic of a video [0] posted by CGP Grey on the 25th August. Not mainstream, but I think the idea has been popular for a while [1]. >6.4 >A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot. >So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw [1] https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

marketingPro 6y ago
Of course people want flexibility, but there are cons- >Much more difficult for collaboration especially for small questions >Bad workers exploring nice policies Pros- >I can sleep/think about code without being paid. Making my solutions lower cost and higher quality >Happier employees >Potentially less micro management needed
- ardit33 6y ago
  You can make 1pm to 5pm as mandatory, so both the 9-5 folks and 1pm to 9pm folks have some overlap for synchronization, meetings and such. As for people exploiting it, you should measure relative performance and not but time One of my first startups I worked had a noon-4pm core hours. You had to be in by noon, and should stay until 4pm, the rest was flexible. I thought it worked really well for both early risers and late owls.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    12-3 is what I prefer for mandatory hours. I'm still going to see you if you are a 6am early bird.
  - jniedrauer 6y ago
    > you should measure relative performance This is also easier said than done. How do you measure programmer performance? LOC is obviously not a reasonable metric. Closed tickets isn't either. It takes an experienced manager who understands code to understand what work is actually being done, and managers like that are rare and valuable.

mkl95 6y ago

I worked for a startup that had an internal "story point meter" that would go up as you closed your tickets. The goal was to pressure employees into completing a certain number of story points per week the CEO considered a good number for a productive employee. Needless to say, this didn't work as intended, and the workforce was split between those who didn't care about it (higher ups) and those who maxed up their meter by overestimating their tasks' story points.

steelframe 6y ago
As a software engineering manager, I put a story-point-based method of task size estimation and team velocity measurement in place about two years ago. A stipulation of this was that at no time would any one developer have their story point velocity assessed. The purpose of this system is to provide the team with a powerful tool that it needs in order to set a realistic timeline on team deliverables, such as a launch milestone or a new feature. The ability of the story point methodology to have predictive power is destroyed when people are incentivized to gamify it.
- sidlls 6y ago
  I’d argue the predictive power of story point methodology has not been established. There are simply too many variables to make estimates more accurate than “best guess”: 1/ the team’s composition at a point in time (and all the variability that comes with this) 2/ the team’s dependencies (a kind of exponential effect is at work here: the team’s dependencies also have all these issues in variability and so do their dependencies) 3/ the type of work being estimated in the context of the product (even “basic” things like “CRUD” can be quite intricate in some cases) Basically unless the estimation is literally for a known change (e.g. modify source code files X, Y and Z with code changes A, B, and C) its predictive power diminishes substantially. It’s not a powerful tool, it’s a micromanagement technique disguised as a tool to empower ICs.
  - steelframe 6y ago
    I completely agree with the impact of the variables you listed. However it's often the case that you need a starting point to estimate timelines. It's never acceptable to tell the decision makers, "We really have no idea how long this will take." Nor is it acceptable to say, "Sure, we'll have it ready in <licked finger in the wind> 8 weeks! Everyone get to work and make that happen (or else)!" Having a concrete plan ("micromanagement?") for getting to the finish line is important, and the story point methodology is an intuitive tool for figuring out what lengths the tasks need to start out with on the timeline.

docdeek 6y ago

Absolutely agree but it would be darn hard to manage with kids. I might be more productive on a Saturday than on a Tuesday, but hard to explain to the kids that you'll miss half the weekend because I wrote better on Saturdays than on Tuesdays.

the__alchemist 6y ago
This is one of the bigger effects of the general downside that social interactions may become difficult, depending on your circles.
Jabbles 6y ago
Well you don't need to optimize for productivity, you can optimize for enjoyment, stress-levels, ability to do admin. And presumably on Tuesday you would have the energy to do something fun with your kids. Also, huge numbers of people have to work at the weekends. From highly-paid doctors to fast-food employees. Presumably their kids understand.
- docdeek 6y ago
  I guess the point is that schools aren't going to adapt to a schedule that isn't Monday to Friday (at least where I live). Spending time with the kids on Tuesday is going to be about 8 hours less time than I could spend with them on a Saturday when they are always free. You're right that kids understand but it's far from ideal when their schedules are so firmly fixed M-F with weekends free.

kevinventullo 6y ago

I think this is something every grad student already knows.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dgaudet 6y ago

i would prefer sunny days off, and bad weather days for meetings.

boulos 6y ago
(Hi Dean!?) But how would you synchronize the poor weather days of Seattle with the nice days the Bay Area? Then again, it’s definitely something I miss from doing research at school. Nice day, go for a hike. Bad day, time to finally rerun those experiments. Sadly, I have way more meetings than those days...
- dgaudet 6y ago
  yeah i dunno how people live in the PNW, i was totally depressed the 8 months i spent in vancouver BC! it would be kind of cool to have calendar software which has a "bad weather" feature: correlate the 10-day forecasts of the required attendees, and pick the least sunny timeslot. mind you i'd also want the software to keep track of how frequently i've hiked, because even a sunny day of meetings is OK after a couple days of hiking. gotta mix it up. i'm sure this bin-packing problem has a reasonable enough solution :)

awinder 6y ago

Beware of history when mucking with weekends: https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-labor-policy https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-lab...

erikerikson 6y ago
What are we to beware? Most of the discussion here is about how increase individual choices over work time. That article details how individual choices was eliminated to increase control over workers.

xwdv 6y ago

By prefixing a title with “Unpopular Opinion” an author is essentially applying for a license to say something unpopular and not get too criticized for it. This is cowardly, people should just state their opinions and be open to whatever reaction it spawns.

dqv 6y ago

Whenever I hear people propose "radical" ideas about work shifts and weekends, I always wonder how they expect it to work at e.g. nuclear power plants and 911 call centers. Most people, given the opportunity, would opt to take the day off whenever they felt like it and come in and leave work as they please. Creatives seem to propose these ideas as universal, but never give even a passing mention about work that is necessarily shift-based. The handwavy answer is "oh we'll incentivize that" or "oh we'll automate it so they don't have to do shift work!" They should just be honest and say that they want special privileges for work and aren't concerned about putting any further thought into it. Anyway, this tweet is really someone trying to turn the thought "I don't really like my work schedule"/"Some people don't like their work schedule" into something profound.

chillacy 6y ago
The author says "isn't for everyone", not "is for no one". Your point about 911 call centers is true, but the principle is just that the work schedule needs to mesh with the job role itself. E.g. restaurants have to be open for meal times, customer service needs to be around when customers are around.
travmatt 6y ago
I assumed this argument was restricted those industries that have 9-5 and weekends & holidays off as the status quo: most b2b and some b2c. I can see how this issue would come up for creatives though. Some jobs have their hours or shifts dictated by the complexities of the profession: for doctors and nurses, handing off patients to new caregivers can be complex and it’d be easy to lose information in the process: the marginal utility of keeping the same person in charge vs the marginal risk that they’re too tired and would make a mistake is something that’s being studied. For creatives, the 9-5 seems to be much more akin to a vestigial organ than a system driven by first principles.
Volundr 6y ago
Well, I can say as someone who supports flexible scheduling and has run a team that way it's not so much that I ignored or didn't think about jobs where it didn't work so much as different jobs have different requirements. I ran a team of software developers, system administrators, and a help desk. The software devs had near complete freedom of scheduling, the sysadmins had a little less, and the help desk had almost none since they needed to be there when the people they were helping were. Everyone had as much flexibility as their job allowed and it worked great. It sucked that the help desk didn't have the flexibility, but they understood why, and I tried to find ways to provide other perks. Plus on the flip side they'd never find themselves trying to resolve an outage at 1 in the morning on a Sunday.

franciscop 6y ago

I commented on this before and I will again. The popular alt schedule shared in a reply (Wed off) is great if your life's purpose is to maximize your work performance in detriment of personal time. That is, if you don't have a work-life balance already. It is not surprising then that people who try to maximize their work come with schedules that are worse for personal time. Instead, especially in our more privileged profession, you should be pacing yourself so that you are not utterly broken by Saturday. Then you can take a full two-days off and do whatever you want, there are so many more things you can do with a two-day off in a row that you cannot do with single days, from simple organizing dinners with friends to weekend getaways.

ghaff 6y ago
Wednesday off wouldn't be for me; I'd prefer long weekends. But comments about how Wednesday off is great because it limits the stress buildup in the course of a week really makes me think something is off. If things are so bad that you can only work two days straight before crashing, something's wrong.

DenisM 6y ago

On a tangent: I derive significant amount of guilty pleasure by slacking for a whole day mid-week. Much more than I do from a "proper" weekend. I believe that's because as time rolls we assign minor duties to ourselves for the weekend, and that weekend becomes just another time of work filled with worry and a sense of obligation. An unplanned day off, by contrast, has no duties. Now if only I could replicate the same sense of freedom on the regular weekend I would be the happiest man alive.

boulos 6y ago

I’m currently shifting my schedule to work Saturdays and take off Mondays (I don’t have children, and my partner is flexible). Before the pandemic, I tried to block off time for deep work by booking multiple hours on my calendar each day. The shift to Saturday has been mostly great. I get a full day of deep work when nobody else is willing to work (Saturday), and neither Monday nor Friday had meetings I cared much about. Being able to walk around on a Monday is way nicer during the pandemic. Again, I get that others can’t replicate it if they have other commitments — importantly, both partners would need to have this flexibility, and most children’s’ schools probably wouldn’t be up for it :). The main thing as many are highlighting below is about overlap (and predictability for recurring meetings). I mostly work with people in US/Pacific, but also US/Eastern and somewhat less often Europe (London and Warsaw) and Sydney. So that’s already unschedulable anyway. People have been reasonably receptive to “oh, I see, yes you don’t work that day” though a good chunk ask “Do you really work on Saturday?” (to which I not only really work on Saturday, I probably get the most useful things done on that day).