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>I don’t see how this is enforceable. I'm not particularly concerned about enforcing this for entrepreneurs and the people who thrive on work. There are defini

>I don’t see how this is enforceable. I'm not particularly concerned about enforcing this for entrepreneurs and the people who thrive on work. There are definitely people who are wired this way and who make the world a better place being who they are. The bigger issue is enforcing it so that one can't make others work more than 35 hours. I would think a 35 hour work week in the West would allow and encourage an increase in entrepreneurial projects.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
> The bigger issue is enforcing it so that one can't make others work more than 35 hours. Therein lies the difficulty. Sure, you could make it illegal to explicitly say “yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday, and if you could come in on Sunday too that’d be great.” But if there’s a culture at a software company of being a hacker on the weekends (whether on side projects or on company projects), even if you’re never explicitly asked to work on something after-hours, the “perpetual hacker” culture will implicitly cause people who aren’t gung ho hackers to fall behind. The worker who, for fun, learned a new algorithm/framework over a weekend that happens to greatly improve some aspect of the company codebase will advance over the worker who didn’t. And sure, there might be companies that explicitly try to avoid hiring the perpetual hackers and only hire people who are not particularly passionate about technology in their spare time. Those companies will be eaten by the ones that only hire hackers.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Why would those hackers not work on their own projects with that time? There is nothing wrong with people doing what they want with their own free time. Making labor scarce so that workers are paid a larger share of the profits they are involved in creating, like they have in the recent past, is the point.
  - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
    > Why would those hackers not work on their own projects with that time? There is nothing wrong with people doing what they want with their own free time. Sometimes, one’s personal projects align with projects relevant to one’s work. Many projects at my work have been so interesting that I continue to think about and work on them in my spare time. Furthermore, the closer one’s personal projects are to their work projects, the more successful they will be at their job. This is what creates an implicit culture of overwork: if Hacker Helen’s personal projects align with her work, causing her to get promoted faster than Hacker Harry, he may also start devoting more of his personal project time to work-related things, in order to maintain job parity with Helen. This will percolate across employees, to the point that Non-hacker Nick, who never touches a computer outside of work, will be seen as underperforming.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago

> The bigger issue is enforcing it so that one can't make others work more than 35 hours. Therein lies the difficulty. Sure, you could make it illegal to explicitly say “yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday, and if you could come in on Sunday too that’d be great.” But if there’s a culture at a software company of being a hacker on the weekends (whether on side projects or on company projects), even if you’re never explicitly asked to work on something after-hours, the “perpetual hacker” culture will implicitly cause people who aren’t gung ho hackers to fall behind. The worker who, for fun, learned a new algorithm/framework over a weekend that happens to greatly improve some aspect of the company codebase will advance over the worker who didn’t. And sure, there might be companies that explicitly try to avoid hiring the perpetual hackers and only hire people who are not particularly passionate about technology in their spare time. Those companies will be eaten by the ones that only hire hackers.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
Why would those hackers not work on their own projects with that time? There is nothing wrong with people doing what they want with their own free time. Making labor scarce so that workers are paid a larger share of the profits they are involved in creating, like they have in the recent past, is the point.
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  > Why would those hackers not work on their own projects with that time? There is nothing wrong with people doing what they want with their own free time. Sometimes, one’s personal projects align with projects relevant to one’s work. Many projects at my work have been so interesting that I continue to think about and work on them in my spare time. Furthermore, the closer one’s personal projects are to their work projects, the more successful they will be at their job. This is what creates an implicit culture of overwork: if Hacker Helen’s personal projects align with her work, causing her to get promoted faster than Hacker Harry, he may also start devoting more of his personal project time to work-related things, in order to maintain job parity with Helen. This will percolate across employees, to the point that Non-hacker Nick, who never touches a computer outside of work, will be seen as underperforming.