5 ms·

Ask HN: What do you think of a 4 hour work day?

14 points by cercatrova 6y ago

There is research / case studies showing that most people don't work a full 8 hours a day, that staying focused so long is next to impossible every single day, and that a shorter workday can increase productivity [0] [1]. With that in mind, what do you think of companies that offer such a work day? You could also do 5 hours a day for 4 days, but I think you'd gain more efficiency from an extra day rather than one extra hour a day, when after 4 hours can be tiring already. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Five-Hour-Workday-Differently-Productivity-Happiness-ebook/dp/B01FGAFDBO [1] https://www.amazon.com/Shorter-Work-Better-Smarter-Heres/dp/1541730712

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
A 20 hour work week should become the norm. We will soon have 10 billion by 2050. Everything is going to be automated. There isn’t going to be a lot of jobs around. If we still survive 2050 and continue having a money/currency.employment based economy, we will have to drastically reduce work hours. But that’s a BIG IF ..we’ll see what the future holds.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  How do you reconcile this with past predictions that we will have a 20 hour work week today, given improvements in efficiency, and yet we have half as many workers instead?
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Desire for higher margins. That's really the whole story. Otherwise, the difference would have went into training, automation, expanding the business, etc... Some companies did it that way. Tektronix, under it's original founder trained everyone, funded startups, and generally expanded both the talent pool and number of companies operating in the region. Made a nice profit, but not the peak possible profit. There are many other examples. See big names in the midwest were headed down similar roads.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      I understand that, my question is moreso how one would make such a 20 hour work week possible economically? It seems like on an individual scale that companies are more profitable with workers working only 20 hour weeks. I honestly think most companies are not actually efficient (see Bullshit Jobs by David Graber) but merely think that they are. Otherwise, there would not be such low hanging fruit as this still present.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        The question is political. As things stand right now? Not possible economically, because any gains will be rolled up in to lower head counts. There have been different value judgements in the past. They can change again in the future too. Will they? Hard to say. If people end up generally happy? Probably not.
        cercatrova 6y ago
        But my point is that they'd make more money keeping headcount the same and cutting hours (keeping compensation the same of course, you're providing more value in half the time) than simply cutting half the workforce. It's like the saying, you can't make a baby with 9 women in a month.
        ddingus 6y ago
        For a lot of people, that means having to find another job, unless compensation remains the same.
        cercatrova 6y ago
        Yes, in this scenario compensation remains the same. Salaried, not hourly. It would definitely suck if you provided more value yet got paid half.
        6y ago
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    It will happen in other counties first before the USA because most people rely on full employment for their health insurance. The scenario is already playing out in other countries.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Looks good but don't think will work for me. For a few reasons: 1 - I actually need to learn through work so I have to take as much work as possible. My biggest complain so far is that HQ took some of our work so there is not that much ownership left. 2 - If you count meetings as work, and taking rest 90% of the time during a meeting as work (10% of the time you are asking meaningful questions and getting feedbacks), then I'm actually working 8-10 hours per day and don't really feel huge strain. In general I'm OK with others with shorter period of work, as long as I get more responsibility and tools to play with :D
- cercatrova 6y ago
  In this scenario, meetings would not exist and would be asynchronous. You could still learn through the job, perhaps ever faster, since you're forced to compress work into 4 hours.
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    meeting is part of the job, very important so can't be removed.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Sure it can. Again, see books I linked above. And in many places there are async ways to accomplish what meetings do, such as with Slack, async standups, emails, etc
abellerose 6y ago
Depends on what profession in question but for programming I would rather do 5 hours per day for 4 days of the week. Three day weekends are healthier for me and I know from my mood being better when it occurs during the summer where I work.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  True, that would be cool. I was debating whether 5 days x 4 hours is better than 4x5.
eucryphia 6y ago
Depends if you count meetings as 'work'.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  I’d apply the following test: Can I surf on the beach during the meetings? No? It’s work.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  No meetings if it's 4 hours, doesn't make any sense time wise.
st1x7 6y ago
I think that you need a 7-8 hour work day to extract the 4-5 fully productive hours. You can't just tell people to do the 4 good hours and skip the rest.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Why can't you? The books I list above show examples of doing just that while increasing efficiency and revenue. Of course they fired those who couldn't keep up (not many people) but that's to be expected.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cercatrova 6y ago
Certain jobs sure. And we're not there yet. Of course once full automation exists there won't be any jobs anymore. You will also find that Malthusian explosions don't actually happen among humans. See the declining birth rates across much of the first world.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  You are right. But if we see declining resources and many of them non renewable, we are worse off. Water comes to mind. phosphorus in Ag ..arable land, rare mineral/metal mining for our electronics/batteries etc. even sand that is ferried around by intl sand mafias is non renewable. Think of the impact of our population vs resources as a ratio rather than a number. The realization is chilling. But back to jobs. Yes..you are right again. But also, jobs that are based on materials consumption(mentioned earlier in this reply) and that can be automated will become smaller vs service/personal interaction industry that will explode. AWS is one such example. As another example: remember when we had cameras? There was a whole industry revolving around cameras, lenses, printing, developing films and then digital media. Now, we have our multitasking camera..it’s uploaded to the cloud and we can view it on an electronic device. How many jobs would have disappeared? All over the world because of this transition. How many new photo memories have been created because photography became part of our mobile phone? It has increased while jobs have also increased. Do we really need facial recognition to sort photos in our smart phone? But some guy in Apple or google or Facebook is trying to figure out how to teach AI to group similar looking facial features after recognizing them as same. An entire class of job has been created..one that did not exist just twenty years ago. They are higher paying jobs. And arguably more people are employed in this new post smart phone world than during Konica film time. More and more goods are becoming virtual and becoming cheaper to produce and consume. But because of the sheer volume, we can still keep up with creating jobs of this kind. However we can’t increase the amount of food or water or dairy milk. Tangible goods will become scarcer and those jobs will disappear. The essentials can never be expensive. Let’s hope water and food is affordable to all in the coming centuries. Which means some sectors necessarily will have to be automated and aligned sectors will also have to be automated. (Example: food production and food supply chain..if one is cheap and the other is expensive, the house of cards falls down). So yes, you are right. It is only applicable for certain jobs. But we can also expand consumption of these to keep revenue and margins up. Example: we can sign up for Facebook as well as YouTube. We can have WhatsApp as well as signal. So the jobs for those qualified to work there will continue to exist even if population increases or more jobs are created. The future will likely have advertised goods that are virtual than real. Maybe online ads for a video game than a bone china teaset. So we can look forward to shortages of real goods due to population pressure/resource scarcity. Here is where margins will have to be maintained to continue getting essentials out to the public. Like food, fiber and material goods etc. But we can also expect service sector booming and employment. And that can be endless employment. Now we will starting running on the Red Queen’s macro economic treadmill. Prices chasing wages chasing employment chasing wages chasing prices. It is like paying someone to whitewash a wall and then paying someone to spray graffiti and then hiring someone to whitewash it again just so everyone gets a chance to make some change and earn some money. That is the future we are looking at... If we can manipulate currency and money market..with man made constructs, why play the charade of mandatory 40 hour work weeks? The only reason to carry on would be to generate money for the govt in the form of taxes. If we embrace automation fully and lesser working hours and eliminate all taxes except on consumption, we will at least have happy human beings. And happy Homo sapiens will likely be less inclined..than those participating in exhausting rat races...to get into conflict situations. This will become important as we will most certainly be facing resource scarcity...esp of non renewable resources.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    You're making a lot of points which I can't answer right now. But I'd say that resources are vastly more than people realize. The entire mass of the Earth is the available resources at our disposal. We just don't have the tech to harvest them. For example, absorbing water from the air, the sea, melting ice caps etc, we can only harvest from fresh water sources but there's no theoretical reason why we can't harvest from these other sources. So I don't really worry about finite resources, as long as tech improves there are basically infinite resources, assuming that we can't get through the entire mass of the planet.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      I respectfully disagree. Resource abundance is a myth. Extraction of resources itself is highly energy expensive and wasteful not to mention that many non renewable resources are what fuels our basic needs. To give a simple example: the daily bowl of oatmeal. From farms out of the farm gate to processing to point of sale, the entire supply chain runs on fossil fuel. Ag is entirely fueled by fossil fuels. If we magically erase the existence of fossil fuels that is a non renewable resource tomorrow, we will all starve. We might not die at once, but our access to almost everything we need to survive would be blocked. And that’s just one example of non renewable resource. I also mentioned soil Phosphorus that is limited..and also sand that is non renewable and used extensively for construction. Water and arable land that is needed for everything from timber to food to fiber. Mining etc. Unless we have a drastic paradigm shift and we tap into some kind of Tesla’esque ‘Free Energy’, we are living off savings instead of capital.
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        My point is that with technology advancing, the total theoretical amount of energy we can use is at least the Earth's mass. This is predicating on technology increasing of course.
        ddingus 6y ago
        Energy density can't be ignored here. Fossil fuels are definitely finite, and few things match their energy density and general utility. Our environment is warming, and we need to bootstrap ourselves onto other energy now, while we have fuels and quick or we may find ourselves energy constrained and fighting the battle in a far less livable place.
- ddingus 6y ago
  There will always be basic labors. I feel valuing these more will help the scenario play out better for everyone. Care takers, laborers of all kinds, plumbers, you get the idea. We all get old. Want your care from the lowest bidder, or worn to the bone family, or from people secure enough for it to be a labor of love, compassion? The lowest bidder may care, as will the frazzled family. But acting on that may not turn out how everyone intends.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    I never said anything about only using the lowest priced service? Of course I'd want higher quality service, not sure what your point is here.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Who said it was about you? Some of us will pay nicely. A majority won't. Can't due to cost and lack of availability. Valuing those basic labors higher is a direct economic stimulus. Demand backed by real dollars. People need enough to buy the stuff, or they don't buy the stuff. Same for services. High automation, without valuing basic labors well = lower demand = less money available to profit = lack of demand for automation.
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        If you replied to my comment in a comment chain, I'd assume it's directly addressing my comment. Otherwise a top level comment suffices. I don't understand your last point, why would there be lower demand for high automation? What do you mean "valuing basic labors well" in the context of automation?
        ddingus 6y ago
        If profit is the motive for automation, what happens when people have less or no income? Who buys the product so automated?

ddingus 6y ago
Don't these things overlap some? More complete automation is ultra expensive. Wages, in general, are flat. Cost and risk exposure on the rise in many parts of the world, and in the US in particular. This is a real barrier to more complete automation. Maybe give people money, health care, lower cost and risk exposure now? Or, maybe value labors differently? Or?
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Why is automation expensive? Robots are usually cheaper than full time workers. And sure, that can be done, but again we're talking about automation currently, not a 4 hour work day.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    The actual manufacture of a robot, depending on its scope of automation, ranges from inexpensive to insane. Most industrial robots are in the upper middle. Some simple robots are cheap, mostly mechanical. So, just making one overlaps both our points of view. Setting mechanical ones aside, the programming, test, safety, and depending on what is needed, interactions between multiple ones is very expensive! A seat of software can cost a years wage for an assembly line worker, and the people needed to do this work tend to be highly educated and expensive as well. That can change, and maybe will as tech advances and more advanced computation, sensing and such continue to scale. But, for the foreseeable future, doing that work is expensive and time consuming. And the product of it tends to be fairly rigid. Changes are not cheap either, though they can be a smaller fraction of the original build, depending on both the change and how robust the initial build was. Maintenance is a factor too, as is aging systems and the software footprint required. I have experience with these industrial machines (FANUC and the like), and they definitely cost less over time than people do, but only at scale and on well defined tasks in well defined conditions. The initial investment is a lot more than people. Where there is any "turbulence", task change, part change, condition change, people do prove far more efficient. As a general rule, robots that are more capable, in the sense of fully replacing skilled people, are a lot more expensive. Where the tasks require less of people, and conditions are constant, they are much cheaper. In my manufacturing career, 80's and 90's I spent time automating and training people to exceed automation performance. Have been on both sides of the discussion. Improvement just is not cheap. Today a lot more is possible, but the basic dynamics remain unchanged. We are far away from being able to generally replace people. And we flat out are not capable of that where the labor involves taking care of one another and or performing the many basic labors we all depend on far more than we realize. This is why I make a point of suggesting we value basic labor differently, and in general, higher. We need it, for one. People, like the HN audience, are not cheap and what we can do is not common. We get valued for that, and there is downward pressure on it all generally. However, if we suddenly have to perform basics ourselves, our output goes way down, and that too is expensive. Having more of our time available is worth far more than the compensation is for basic labor. Most people are not like us, and the training needed, assuming the basic skill is present, is expensive as well. Most jobs are basic labors too. That means most wages are not contributing to demand, and as those numbers rise, with costs and risks, the issues grow more acute.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Automation and robotics are expensive, yes. Speaking for Ag(what I consider my domain of expertise as opposed to machines or coding), I have no qualms about using expensive Ag automation in place of cheap labour. Even without the exploitation factor, human beings shouldn’t have to do manual labour and sometimes dangerous, dirty and repetitive work. An example for a small scale farm would be weeding between vegetable rows. An example for a larger scale orchard that is 1000 acres, automation means precision ag(reducing toxic/unnecessary inputs, leading to $ savings, environmental conservation, minimizing collateral damage..like spraying during night time instead of flying crop dusters during night time, supply chain efficiencies and preventing waste. Some jobs shouldn’t exist at all for human labors regardless of cost of automation. Money is a man made construct. When we say ‘it would be more expensive to automate’, the statement is an artificial truth. Otoh, human beings, their health, welfare, habitat, nature and environmental impacts are all real. I wish to see all low paying manual labours end. Maybe someone will pull a plough to harvest potatoes as a hobby. And that ought to be for fun. Not for our food(essential for life as we can’t synthesize our own food) or for a living wage. I hope that in my lifetime, our food production goes mostly..if not entirely from human labour to mechanical and robotic automation. If it costs more, so be it. Money is an IDEA.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        And idea that is linked to real labor and resources. Expensive = real resources and real labor that someone is required to prioritize for automation as opposed to something else.