17 ms·

Is 40 hours a week too much?

• datavirtue 4y ago
  They are so cute! Acting like HR cares or can do anything about this. Seriously? They avoid work and controversy like the black plague.
• patmcc 4y ago
  For something I'm passionate about? No. For what I'm actually doing? Yes.
• johnthuss 4y ago
  There is so much variability in the kind of work people do it's hard to make a rule that fits everyone. For knowledge workers I think 40 hours is near the top of productive time you are able to wring from people. Certainly some individuals could work much more if engaged, but on the whole, without a strong incentive otherwise, I think 40 hours is a maximum limit.
  • SteveGerencser 4y ago
    I agree with you on this. It is not only task based but individual based. When I am at my desk doing tech type work I max out 'productively' at about 30 hours +/- depending on what I'm doing. But when I'm out doing farm stuff I can run 60 or 70 hours without much trouble when on the tractor etc., or a bit less when stacking hay bales. Mentally tired, for me, is much harder to recover from than physically tired. I'm not saying I want to work 70 or 80 hours a week lifting heavy things, but this type of hourly rating system can be very subjective by the individual.
  • nkozyra 4y ago
    I think if there were more variability in scheduling a lot of people would exceed 40 hours on average without much issue. If office workers had the ability to have more relaxed PTO I think it would alleviate a lot of that. But even in places where that's possible via the type of work, it's still culturally not acceptable to just take a day off here or there without a "reason."
  • Frost1x 4y ago
    From my personal experience it's closer to 30, sometimes less depending on the level of creativity and number of independent disciplines/specialized knowledge bases I need to draw upon and unify for a solution. After that I'll happily welcome the most mundane, repetitive and simple tasks.
  • fourseventy 4y ago
    Most doctors, lawyers and investment bankers all work well over 40 hours.
    • vsareto 4y ago
      Investment bankers are just being exploited though. I don't think they fight against it because of the payoff.
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Great blog post. Does Okta have a four day work week yet? https://www.4dayweek.com/ https://www.4dayweek.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-week-uk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-standard-for-40percent-of-companies-ey-study-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-sta...
  • swyx 4y ago
    yeah i was very surprised to see this on an okta domain. you probably shouldn’t be putting out posts like these unless you’re literally announcing a 4 day work week
    • thakoppno 4y ago
      okta may have among the best datasets to measure work at tech cos. some days it seems like my job at tech co is to authenticate.
      • swyx 4y ago
        "what is my purpose?" "you SSO into b2b saas and send a few kb's around every day" "oh my god"
• tschellenbach 4y ago
  If you want to find the optimal number look at how many hours startup founders put in. Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work. They have no incentive to work less or more than the optimal number of hours.
  • adwn 4y ago
    This assumes that 1) they themselves know how many hours of work leads to optimal productivity [1], and 2) there are no external factors that incentivize them to work fewer or more hours for appearances' sake. [1] If startup founders know their optimal number of hours, why wouldn't regular employees also know this? Why do you think that startup founders have privileged knowledge in this regard?
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    Hmm feels like the myth of the rational actor, while the incentivized may not be there, individual differences likely are.
    • goodpoint 4y ago
      Indeed. Not to mention that such assumption ignores the risks for personal health. Plenty of startups go bankrupt and plenty of founders experience burnout, back pain, RSI etc. Very few people can work 40+ full hours hunched on a keyboard for 3-4 decades.
  • Smaug123 4y ago
    They're also solving a somewhat different problem, namely "make it to the next funding round without thinking more than a year into the future". A company which already has solid funding may well have plans on the multi-year timeframe, and should probably try to avoid burning out its people.
  • blue039 4y ago
    There is a point here but it doesn't actually matter that much in my opinion. Your point is if you're invested in your work there is no limit to how many hours you put in. I'd tend to agree with this saccharin made-for-TED description. If I am paid $10/hr for my work I can't eat. My incentives are not aligned. You dont pay me enough to eat. If I am paid $xxx/hr for my work but I am bound by NDA and non-compete, don't get bonuses in line with product sales (N% of sales go to my check), etc I am not aligned. The only people "aligned" are the most useless. Sales. Yes, things need to be sold but if the people laboring are not incentivized sales will be useless along with the entire C-suite. There is no such thing as a "sufficiently incentivized" laborer unless you're paying them a chunk of sales (see: a co-op). Hence why anti-work is such a popular concept even among the highest paid cohorts. Even as developers, we are being robbed blind and are worth far more than they pay. There's a simple test for this: if you work 20 more hours next week will your check potentially go up significantly? If not, your labor is being stolen from you.
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Too much for whom? For businesses, definitely not too much; if you're awake you could be working. For workers? We worked less when we were hunter-gatherers, and even peasants up to the industrial revolution worked seasonally and thus had an average of 20 hours a week. Now we work 40 hours a week for 44-48 weeks a year. And for what? To pay too much for health care, be stressed out constantly, sit in traffic commuting, and waste away sitting in a chair ruining our eyes staring at screens.
  • kneebonian 4y ago
    You know I hear this repeated about how people who did substance farming supposedly did less but that just doesn't seem to square with my experiences. Two examples I'll cite are the first is the experience recorded by my great great grandfather, he grew up on a farm in central Utah and when he was 14 years old his dad told him to take the sheep and go up into the mountains and don't come back until it snowed. I guess you could count it different but I think we'd be hard pressed to say that wasn't full time 24/7 work for 3 straight months, then when he got home he would have to work the harvest, repair the fences, etc. Another more modern example is the Amish, I don't know if you've had a lot of experience with the Amish but they know how to work, they start before sunup and push through to sundown, taking a short break for lunch and then back at it for hours on end, I definitely wouldn't say they average 20 hours a week over the year. I just see this claim repeated over and over and it feels like it doesn't make sense and is pushed more because those repeating it like it than any substantial basis in reality.
    • heavyset_go 4y ago
      Your great great grandfather from your anecdote worked during/after the Industrial Revolution. Historical evidence shows that people worked much less than they did during and after the Industrial Revolution[1]. [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
      • varjag 4y ago
• mkl95 4y ago
  Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.
  • nkozyra 4y ago
    > If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell. I disagree. But I think what we qualify as "work" is more rigid than it needs to be. Is spending 5 minutes looking at HN every few hours work? Most people would say no, but it absolutely helps developers to know what's going on or new or what other devs outside their company are saying. If I spend 20 minutes reading about a language/app that my company doesn't use is that work? I think a lot of the "yes" answers would be accompanied by rolling eyes.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Also, there is an assumption that everyone can be productive for any length of time without some form of intermission to break it up. What if most people need a 5-10 minute break for every 30 minutes work? You might not be able to get around that by just making the daily or weekly work hours shorter. You'd just be applying the productivity factor to fewer total hours. I doubt we've found the optimal work to rest ratio, but a lot of these assumptions go unchallenged in these discussions.
    • nkrisc 4y ago
      Ok but can you write an OKR for reading HN?
      • dilyevsky 4y ago
        Best not forget to groom that ticket as well
      • 4y ago
• charles_f 4y ago
  tl;dr Yes
• padolsey 4y ago
  I've just started a new role as an EM and because of disability have been able to reduce my hours (and proportionally my pay) down to 20hrs per week. I work only 9am-3pm [minus 1hr for lunch] on Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri. It's going well for me so far. My cognitive hours are nicely compressed into those time windows, so although it's still hard (due to disability stuff) I'm still finding it so so much easier and more fulfilling than toiling behind a physical desk for 40-60hrs a week, half of which I'd be mostly whiling away time or doing performative work. I spent over ten years doing just that... I look back and see so much wasted time, and saw so many colleagues who seemed drained and generally rushed to fit in 'life' things around work. Family, friends, hobbies, medical appointments, enjoying nature [...]. It should be the opposite of this. Work should come second to life, especially if we have the luxury of making it so. Otherwise, what are we all doing??
• Apocryphon 4y ago
  I never realized that Robert Owens' quote codifying eight hours of work is from 1817. Good golly. Our entire industrial mental model of work comes from at least two hundred years ago.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    That wasn't an industrial mental model, it was a utopian socialist proposal that took a century and a lot of blood to win.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      I mean that the mental model dates from the early Industrial Revolution (I previously thought that it wasn't created until the Gilded Age or the Victorian era), and is overdue to be revised given the rise of white collar work.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  It's far more than anyone worked before the industrial revolution who wasn't enslaved. Subsistence farming or hunting and gathering don't take 40 hours a week. The reason there's a 40 hour workweek is because socialists, anarchists, and communists fought for one. It was marketed as splitting the day into three even parts, and getting weekends off. There's nothing special about it other than it is a round number, and far more work than is necessary to produce enough to support a family, so it offers ample excess for the owners of capital. The optimal number of hours is the least necessary to have a comfortable life.
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    > Subsistence farming or hunting and gathering don't take 40 hours a week. Also people had tons of holidays during the middle age in Europe. Crazy working hours peaked during the industrial revolution when workers had life expectations reaching minimums of 20 years. Not to mention that in many places men were working and women were homemakers some 70 years ago. Now that everybody works we spend our evening and weekends doing chores and housekeeping. (And no, I'm not saying we should go back to 1950!)
  • constantcrying 4y ago
    >Subsistence farming or hunting and gathering don't take 40 hours a week. It is extremely interesting to see how people lived in a pre-industrial era. There is a series of videos about long retired german tradesmen, who worked in long dead traditional trades (wheel making, woodcuting and many other very fascinating and obscure ones). I liked it a lot. The consistent theme there is that these people do not have a "work day". There is absolutely no seperation between their private life and what they do for work. Of course they are not doing high intensity work for 16 hours a day, but they are going through a wide varity of different activities, some leisure ones like eating with their families, but a lot of it directly or indirectly related to their work. How much and when they work can be dependent on a varity of factors, but their work is completely integrated into their lives. One thing I really dislike about a 40h work week as a person living further in the north is that in the winter it is dark when I return. The sun rises at around 7:30, long after I need to wake up.
• ScottStevenson 4y ago
  Great article on this, advocating for 40+ hours a week of real work: http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...
• alexfromapex 4y ago
  Yes, why is this still a question? Look at how productivity relates to wages after inflation adjustment. We have all been robbed for decades.
  • jvanderbot 4y ago
    Relative wages have not risen, but standard of life really has. For a week of work at minimum wage, I can buy a lot more cool stuff than anyone from 100 years ago. Things have gotten so good, that almost everyone has riches beyond the wildest dreams of someone from 1850, it's just that we all have it, so it doesn't feel like we've gotten much more from our productivity.
    • alex_young 4y ago
      Well, for the most part you can't compare the minimum wage of 100 years ago since it didn't exist, and subsequently excluded most workers until much later. In 1966 the federal minimum wage was amended to include most workers, so a comparison at that point can be made. In 1967 the minimum wage was $1.40, or $10.92 adjusted for inflation. The current minimum wage is $7.25, so in dollar terms the cost of goods, especially housing, really is much higher in minimum wage terms.
      • jvanderbot 4y ago
        What I'm saying is comparing wages is meaningless. If you compare what a month of work gets you in USA, it's astounding compared to what it go you 150 years ago. Imagine buying a beat up car, internet connected computer, cell phone, refrigerator, etc. That's where the productivity growth went: Into better stuff, not into bigger piles of shells.
        • alex_young 4y ago
          I don’t disagree that the quality of many goods is much higher, but when you start looking at what the lowest quartile can actually afford to consume the results are pretty starkly worse than they have been in our relatively recent past. A huge chunk of lower income is dedicated to housing, to an extent that many cannot actually afford housing at all. The gains of our productivity have been distributed in a most unequal manner.
• alexashka 4y ago
  Having dummies in charge is too much. Why do we need to dance around discussing work from home, 40 hours, wages, etc. Just address the root problem.
• tacheiordache 4y ago
  It depends on the type of work. 40 hours of deep work isn't sustainable for too long without breaks and leads to mental health issues.
• daneel_w 4y ago
  In my early 20s when I worked as an electrician I never felt that 40 hour long weeks were too much. Working as a programmer I definitely feel that it is way too much. The head (mine at least) really needs a lot more time to recuperate.
  • dimitrios1 4y ago
    Yeah, 40/week in restaurants or a trade really was a breeze. Most of the time you wanted to put in minimum 40 to get benefits.
    • zip1234 4y ago
      Working construction, when I was wasn't there I wasn't thinking about my job at all. Once I left the jobsite I was free. I know it is different if you are managing a job, but as an average worker it was not too bad.
• martin1975 4y ago
  I spend 40 hours at work. Doesn't mean I am productive for all those hours. My productivity may be 20-30 hrs/week between meetings.
• yboris 4y ago
  4DWW - Four Day Work Week is the future. So many benefits for workers and the company! It's a win-win for many types of companies. Even if it's not a win for all companies, society would benefit greatly by mandating 4 days of 8 hours with no loss of pay as the standard. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/these-companies-ran-an-experiment-pay-workers-their-full-salary-to-work-fewer-da https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/11/15/1136039542/the...
  • feoren 4y ago
    I wish I lived in the world where "obviously beneficial to everyone" implied "it will be the future!" Plenty of things just get worse, just because. People are fucking awful. I look forward to the day when AGI takes over the world.
    • yboris 4y ago
      An interesting book on this topic: https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/ - Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Societies (and smaller groups like companies too) could get stuck in a shitty "equilibria" - where even a non-expert can spot the inefficiencies, suggest obvious improvements, and yet not have the change occur. A great analysis of the unfortunate gridlock we find ourselves in sometimes.
  • CBarkleyU 4y ago
    Disagree. Let me introduce you to 5DWWBO6HPD (acronym is subject to change). 5 days, 6 hours. If I dont have any meetings past my 6th hour of being in work-mode (including lunch time), I'm not going to produce anything that won't anger me future-self. The 5DWWBO6HPD also helps you to be actually productive after the 6th hour when the need arises every once in a while and you have to be on "Elon is breathing down my neck"-mode.
    • return_to_monke 4y ago
      Maybe 5D6HWW?
• ok_dad 4y ago
  If I buckle down I can do 10 hours a day 3 days a week for a few months, then I burn out four a while. If I do 4 to 6 hours a day of low to medium intensity work (focused debugging with interspersed Google searches and occasional HN breaks) 4 days a week, I’m able to keep it up forever. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do 9-5x5 ever again, especially having to go into an office.
• randomdata 4y ago
  Back in the golden age of working from home, when internet service wasn't sufficient for for the barrage of pointless meetings, I was working no more than two hours per day. My coworkers and employers, who all worked in the office at the time, used to joke that I must be an entire team of people. I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result. It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I want to get things done.
  • Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    It is also very difficult to define "work" and the various definitions contradict each other. I've met programmers who start coding as soon as they hear about a requirement and then spend weeks untangling the web of spaghetti code they have previously written down. I tend to sit down and think before I write even a single line of code. In the office, I used to stare at my screen with headphones on to "look like I was working". Now that I work from home, I usually spend that time walking around the house, doing mindless chores, and sometimes lying down on my bed in the dark. I would say that the time spent lying in my bed is my most productive time. Someone else might say I steal billable hours.
    • rrgok 4y ago
      I feel the same about stealing billable hours. My creative time happens always in the background, when I doing chores or watching tv series. And then I come to the office and stare at my screen to "look like I was working". I can't help it and sometime my creative time spans 2-3hrs, something I cannot do during staring hours. I feel guilty. But your answer put my mind at ease, thank you.
• frank_bb 4y ago
• larsonnn 4y ago
  I have more of a problem with companies trying to compress 80hours of work in 40hours.
• cwoolfe 4y ago
  "Finally, when the 40-hour workweek was established, two-income households were rare. Only 15.2% of married women were employed in 1940. But as of 2012, 60% of households had dual incomes. When both members of a couple work, it leaves less time for children, chores, errands, food preparation, and everything else that must occur outside of working hours." 40 hour workweek is fine for most people, but I think HR ought to be more flexible in working hours and salary employees choose, based on their season of life. Because we are dual-income with 3 young children, I work 32 hrs instead of 40; but it's an odd arrangement I had to ask for. I see families in a simliar situation struggling, and I think it ought to be more of the norm to offer this without a company raising questions about productivity/loyalty/laziness/benefits etc.
• Chinjut 4y ago
  There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about (by allowing recharging, preventing burnout, etc.). I worry that this already concedes too much. This allows for just as much stressful dominance of work over the rest of life, and shame over any deviation from this script, as maximizes productivity. Even if my shorter-work-hours productivity doesn't match my longer-work-hours productivity, I'd still prefer shorter-work-hours, with no guilt over having those preferences. My goal in life is not to optimize everything I do for maximum benefit of my employer; I have my own priorities and trade-offs to worry about.
  • scaramanga 4y ago
    Right, for me it'd ideally be zero, so i can spend some of the free time doing productive, socially constructive work, that I consent to do without threats, inducements, or coercion.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this will bring about Usually in the form of conflating diminishing returns with less absolute productivity.
• ojbyrne 4y ago
  "Cut the workweek back to 35 hours" I feel like that's been the standard in a lot of industries - 9-5 with an hour for lunch - for a long time.
• vouaobrasil 4y ago
  Yes it is. I have a job like that now that I got out of school. I've been working at it for 5 years and honestly it sucks all of my life away. Basically the week is all work with evenings being too tired to enjoy life and the weekends being about recovery for the next work week. Luckily it's a tech job pays well, so I saved up enough so that I can quit. I'm doing that in a couple months, and after I'll just enjoy life and support myself with freelance work that I enjoy a lot more. F** the system, I couldn't care less about the success of any company or the products they produce.
• edwnj 4y ago
  The real question is how can I short okta.. Some person or group in this company was paid to do this..
  • edwnj 4y ago
    actually found it (Nasdaq: OKTA).. The company lost an insane amount of money each quarter (-46% margin).. The are worth almost 8 billion, 1.3 billion in revenue to net -850m in revenue.. If it wasn't for their balance sheet (pretty strong) and gamble short this crap.. I might still, im gonna wait a few months for the woke communists in the org to drain money then short.. I'm almost 100% certain these people are gonna drain the balance sheet whilst their revenue gonna collapse next year.
• sbf501 4y ago
  8-to-5 is 45 hours a week. I'm still in the office, even for lunch. Considering travel, it bumps up to 50 hrs/week. I hate how this 10-hour "work tax" is always dismissed as part of 40 hour work week.
  • innocentoldguy 4y ago
    This is why I will only take remote jobs. I got sick of spending two hours a day in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
    • 65 4y ago
      You could try living in a city where you can commute via train. 1 hour on a train is significantly different than 1 hour driving a car.
      • tluyben2 4y ago
        Still 1 hour of your life gone. Might be better by train but why do it at all if not needed?
  • tluyben2 4y ago
    Do you go to the office because you need to or want to? Seems there is some difference there.
    • sbf501 4y ago
      Why does that even matter? Or do you just assume everyone is a Javascript programmer? If I say "need" people will tell me it's my fault and to change jobs. If I say "want" people will tell me it's my fault and to change jobs.
      • tluyben2 4y ago
        I don’t assume anyone is a javascript programmer by choice really but anyway. Of course it matters; if you want to be in the office, why count your travel hours? Your choice. If you need to be in the office, that’s another case.
• adultSwim 4y ago
  Yes
• ladyattis 4y ago
  For me, the 40 hour work week is okay but I think the problem at least for development is getting non-technical people to be responsive or provide the necessary input to keep me busy. When I'm support duty for a sprint, I find myself twiddling my thumbs sometimes awaiting a response to a question on a ticket from a user to confirm or get more context for the issue so I can do my work as there's only so much looking at logs, source code, and the like to tease out the cause of the issue. If anything, I think companies who have more knowledge and process based workers should look to use the free time for learning/studying. Maybe give funds to take courses whether they're online or offline to help such workers (myself included) improve our skill set. I'm not against more free time off for the same pay but I just think there can be more uses of the time than just being off the clock is what I guess I'm saying.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Personally, I feel that it's too little. No one is perfectly productive. If you devote 40 hours to something, you're going to spend at least 10-15 hours out of that on non-productive busywork. There are also some tasks that just require extended periods of focus before something "clicks". No way I could write or code if I was told to pack up and leave after a fixed amount of time. Also, I've always found that when I'm working hard, I'm more creative in my hobbies as well. I make music as a hobby and whenever I've taken a break from work, the music just doesn't flow. Caveat: I work for myself so the work is both important and enjoyable to me, and I don't have to deal with office bureaucracies. If I was working for someone else, I might have different views.
• earth2mars 4y ago
  Elon says too little
• eweise 4y ago
  Yes, 40 hours is too much. 16 is perfect. Tuesday and Wednesday please, working from home of course.
• dzikimarian 4y ago
  Interesting to see such articles, when I heard from some people on HN that it's ok and healthy to have two contracts at the same time. Which one is it then?
  • rr888 4y ago
    Plus a side project.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    Some people have the energy to do two jobs at once even if they don't strictly need the money to survive (like many minimum wage workers do); if they can keep themselves in check, that's a great way to make more money and build up a comfortable life or prepare for an early retirement. It's not for everyone and it's certainly not the standard. There are also people who work themselves to death and pretend to be fine. I'm sure it _can_ be healthy and fine if that is what you want; it just shouldn't be expected of people.
  • BonitaPersona 4y ago
    Different people think different things.
• epaulson 4y ago
  At the beginning of the pandemic, as a cost-saving measure my company did furloughs, which for most of us were mandatory unpaid days off two days a week for 6 weeks. We could take off Sun/Mon, Mon/Tues, Thurs/Fri, Fri/Sun, or Mon/Friday, depending on coverage and what made sense regionally. (Our middle east offices worked Sun-Thu normally, the Islamic weekend is Fri/Sat) I have to say, only 3 days "at work" in a week felt just a bit too few, and I was often rushing to get everything done that had to get done that week. On the other hand, on US holiday weeks with Monday offs, are fantastic feelings work-wise. I feel like I get basically the same amount done in the week, and the weekend is considerably more relaxing- still tired Friday night, but Sunday afternoon and night isn't a mad dash of "finish all chores that need to be done before the weekend wraps up" Things would be different if my job was something more service-focused, like a doctor or dentist or hair stylist, where by definition they're going to be at 20% less productive if they're only seeing clients/patients/etc for 4 days a week instead of 5, so I'm not quite sure how as a society we balance that out, but I really wish 4 day weeks were much more the norm, and if I ever run my own company, that's what we're going to aim for.
  • rqtwteye 4y ago
    I agree about the 4 day week. During Covid may company reduced work hours to 32 and we took off Friday. I definitely felt that people were actually working these hours and meetings were way more focused. Overall i don’t think our release schedule got hurt at all by being less hours at work
    • philmcp 4y ago
      Did you return to a 5 day week out of interest? If not I'd love to add the company to https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/
      • rqtwteye 4y ago
        Unfortunately we have returned to a 5 hour week. And management is pushing hard for a return to the office.
• unixhero 4y ago
  It is too much
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think the most important step towards flexible work hours in the US is decoupling health benefits from employers. Currently these benefits are essentially a flat cost per worker, and an incentive to squeeze the most out of each person. If the two were decoupled, employees would more easily be able to adjust their work hours to their personal desires. If you want to work 20 hours per half pay, great. If you want to work 60 hours for 50% more, great. Individual desires and needs very greatly among people, so such a system would allow a wider variety of people too meet their needs
• spencerchubb 4y ago
  For those of us in university, 40 hours a week is laughable. Especially since I work while in school
• wizofaus 4y ago
  The question is with all these trial projects where organisations and even apparently entire countries experimented with shorter working weeks, is that despite the results consistently demonstrating the benefits, why in no case did it stick? (*) How long did it take for the 40-hour week to become almost universally established after the initial trials? I'm definitely in favour of a trend towards a 4 day week (or even a 9 day fortnight), but I don't think I could ever be totally comfortable being the only guy in the office to do so (esp. if I expected to be paid the same amount!). (*) I'm similarly curious about UBI pilots!
• kebman 4y ago
  I think people conflate "being productive" with "work." The work is simply the contractual agreement between you and your employer. He or it has a notion about how long it's supposed to take, and you do too. And so on your end, you have to be willing to give up a certain amount of freedom in order to stay productive enough for the workplace to want to award you for the time spent in their service, whether that time is productive or not. On their end, they of course want you to be as productive as possible, but they also know that it's not possible 100% of the time. And so that is the basis for the contract. Then there are ways around it. Say you can make a hack that'll make you able to complete the job in half that time, or less. Lots of people get paid obscene amounts of money for very little "work" but the value of that work is simply that high, and so that's what they're paid for it. So instead in thinking in terms of hours or work, I tend to want to think in terms of how much time I need to provide value. And the less time that is, the better - for both parties. They get better value for money, and I get more time to dream up better ways of creating value.
• SCdF 4y ago
  To add my anecdata to the pile, if I "live right"[1] and ignore the pressure to work work work, I naturally have about 6hrs "bum on seat" work time per day, give or take. And that's without a commute. Or kids. I haven't personally noticed being at the computer for 2hrs less a day causing me to be less productive. What noticably makes me more productive: - Not feeling exhausted, depressed, shitty, or feeling like I never have time for anything - Working bum on seat until I feel like I'm not productive, then taking a break (go for a walk, empty the dishwasher) and let my brain solve the problem for me. - If I really want to get more done and focus, and I have a clear goal, rounds of pomodoros [1] get enough sleep; exercise each day; cook healthy meals; spend time with my partner; have time to myself; have time to perform daily chores and errands, etc
• thot_experiment 4y ago
  It's complicated. I would never want to work for 40 hours/wk (honestly 20 is about my limit) in a hierarchy, but I could easily see myself doing more than that in a partnership. Yes, you get diminishing returns on work if you're working a lot of hours, but you can still get more done per day even if it's not as efficient. Also, constant immersion in a domain causes acceleration/synergies that you don't get with a more "healthy" work-life balance. That being said I think chasing this is never worth it unless you're getting the same share of the loot as everyone else. (Or if you're the one who's disproportionately set up to benefit from the group's success, but I generally consider that to be immoral)
• hesdeadjim 4y ago
  Employee? Sure, aim to get your workweek as close to 0 hours as possible unless you genuinely love what you are doing, then clamp it at 40. Startup/founder/significant equity holder? Sorry, no -- at least in the first year or three. Working 50 hours a week vs. 40 can be the difference between success and failure in the first few years of a company. I work anywhere between 40 and 60 hours depending on how critical a looming deadline is. No platitudes about "oh you're more productive < 40" are remotely true. My extra effort has translated directly into dodging many snares that would have screwed us hard. I do however place 60 as my soft limit, beyond that I will pay for it hard after a week or two. Contrary to the cliches that abound around this topic, I am in good shape, healthy, have a rich-enough social life, and am a great dad.
  • bearjaws 4y ago
    Always need to keep in mind value of work. Working at Joe Widget Co. and get a tight deadline for a new feature? Value of the work was already low, value of your extra effort is pretty much unknowable, why would anyone work overtime? Early stage startup its much easier to draw a line straight from work -> value.
    • hesdeadjim 4y ago
      Yep, I think this point gets lost in most of these articles. If someone is used to already working five hours a day and surfing Reddit for another three hours as a "break", then this less than 40 crap sounds like an obvious no-brainer - I can already hear the "but I get my work done in 25 hours for the week!" tripe. For the rest of us who can work without any distractions for as many hours as necessary, it's silly.
• eikenberry 4y ago
  For creative positions I don't see hours/week as a useful metric for anything. Most of my time 'working' is not sitting at my computer typing or whatever.. it's thinking about things while laying in bed while I can't sleep or when sitting on the can or when taking a walk (etc.). Often my subconscious comes up with something while I'm not even thinking about it. So I'm working when playing games or reading as well. Working isn't labor, it isn't something you do. It is all about how much value you create.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  This is an easy question for a bunch of people who are supposed to be writing code right now.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Reasoned from an employer, the economic optimum consist of two parts: 1) The time you work is spent doing meaningful things. 2) The amount of hours equals the point where if you'd add hours, the negatives outweigh the positives. In that sense it's bizarre how both parameters don't seem much of a priority. Entire armies of office workers are stuck in zoom meetings and email, seeing most of their day cut up into tiny slices where you can't do focused work. It's quite common to hear that people do about 2 hours of actual work per day. Rather than obsessing over some ancient number of hours "present", shouldn't effectiveness be an absolute top priority? Not only do managers not seem to care that their employees do little real work, they actually believe that those small blanks in your calendar means you're not busy enough. Have some more meetings. Let's collaborate more! Here's my "CEO for a day" solution: A system will for each meeting calculate its cost, which would be the amount of participants multiplied by their hourly rate. Since a 1 hour meeting really costs about 2 hours of productivity (just before and after meetings, nobody does work), the sum would be multiplied by 2, or 1.5 at least. Once per month or so, you check the aggregates, starting with the worst offenders. It looks like Tom organized about 30K worth of meetings last month. Now Tom is going to tell the company what tangible value he produced in these meetings to offset this. You'll soon find that it's all power laws. A small group of people responsible for flooding people with meetings. And you can do the same with email. Efficient workers sent perhaps a handful of emails per day, yet Tom seems to be sending 50-100, all day and night. Perhaps Tom should shut the fuck up and not mistake his joy in communicating with people for work.
• bob1029 4y ago
  Quantization of work is so weird to me in the context of software engineering. Most of the work I do happens passively as I think about some problem. Much of this thinking occurs outside of the traditional 9-5 window. "Amount of time spent presiding over a work PC" doesn't count as a useful metric in my book. I prefer to measure the quality of work via outcomes and customer feedback. Meetings are an unhappy exception to all of this, but they are a necessary evil. Eliminate unnecessary meetings with prejudice - They will come back like zombies if they were really that important to the business. Contributions still need to be mapped to outcomes, but that has nothing inherently to do with a time dimension. Non-contributors and relative performance should still be quite obvious to management, even if you can't say exactly how much time was spent by each participant.
• robswc 4y ago
  Figure Little's law may be a bit applicable to the discussion :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law You never really want "100% utilization" (something I feel a lot of managers don't quite understand). The answers here are very interesting. I work more than 40 hrs (my own business stuff) and I always wish there was more time in the day, lol. Never worked at a big company but I do imagine if people are only "working" 20 hrs that's a sign that they could "work-less." IMO as long as stuff gets done (in a timely manner) that's all that should matter.
• aqsheehy 4y ago
  I don't think businesses benefit from a 4 day work week but who cares, I don't think they benefit necessarily from a weekend either and we still do it.
• hax0ron3 4y ago
  >In the 1800s, it was common for people in manufacturing to work nearly 100 hours per week: between 10- and 16-hour shifts over six-day workweeks. >By the early 1900s, many industries had adopted the eight-hour workday, but most people were still working six days a week. If these figures are true, it helps me to understand why so many people in the 19th and early 20th century were huge advocates of socialism and communism. Even though, having read about the history of the last 100 or so years, I think that communism is a relatively inefficient and often brutally murderous form of government, even I feel that it might be better to launch a revolution to overthrow the rich and take their stuff than to put up with working so much that there is essentially no time in one's life to do anything other than work, all just to be able to live in some cramped apartment in a dirty industrial city.
• georgeplusplus 4y ago
  Here's what I believe : the fraternizing and huddling around the break room during coffee breaks and distracting leisurely talks with coworkers at their desk, which all contribute to wasted time at the office would still happen in a 30 hour work week. Except, Workers would be demanding overtime pay to finish the work they have normally been doing in a 40 hour work week and employers would have to pay premium compensation for the same level of work they used to be getting at 40 hours a week.
  • notacop31337 4y ago
    I find it curious that you point out regular social interaction as a major culprit of lost time here but not the 4 different communication mediums that every workplace uses, or the egregious levels of ritualistic meetings, or the expectation of travel being on employee time, or the lessening of the value of our dollar resulting in multiple people having to work full time jobs in a single household to provide the same as generations ago. If you don't want people to interact in normal ways, why have a business, would business outcomes not be improved by humans interacting and forming social bonds within their workplace, a place that by current standards, we spend 50% of our awake hours?
    • georgeplusplus 4y ago
      I didn't point out meetings because they are required by the company therefore the company deems them valuable enough to consider work time. So it stands to reason those meetings you think are useless will still exist In a 30 hour work week. As opposed to fraternizing at a person's desk, which is not considered work time. Generally speaking. I'm sure there exists companies that encourage fraternization as part of work but they are definitely the minority.
• Euphorbium 4y ago
  Usually when there is a question in the title, the answer is no. Not this time. But 35h is also ridiculously too much. It needs to be 20h max, just because households are dual income, and personal work needed to be done did not disappear.
  • hu3 4y ago
    Can relate. I've been splitting household chores 50/50 and there's barely any time to do anythying else.
• wenbin 4y ago
  Future of knowledge work [0]: 1. 5-hour work day, not pretending busy work for 8 or even 12 full hours (eg, 996 in China tech corps) Knowledge work, especially creative work, is just different from hard manual labor. More work hours won’t necessarily produce more value For some people / jobs, maybe 2-hour work day is enough. @tobi says it well [1]: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company." 2. One or multiple part-time jobs For some part-time jobs, you work for money; for others, you work for fun/impact. See how @gumroad works [2]: No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees 3. Streaming income in real time, rather than bulk income once or twice per month You have a stream of small incomes 24/7. Some are passive incomes, while others are active incomes. You get paid directly from customers you serve, not from a proxy (eg HR in big corp). Anytime during the day, you know how much you’ve made so far --- [0] https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409 https://twitter.com/wenbinf/status/1472356359953809409 [1] https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433 https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433 [2] https://sahillavingia.com/work https://sahillavingia.com/work
  • titanomachy 4y ago
    The gumroad approach is very interesting. Do you know if there any other companies that work like that? Caveat is that I do need to be a full-time employee, for visa reasons. I’m currently at a top-tier tech company which pays very well but wastes an incredible amount of my time on unnecessary overhead. It would be amazing to get my work done in four hours a day and spend the rest of my time on fulfilling projects and relationships.
• rr888 4y ago
  Reading the comments it seems like we need a recession. The job market of the last few years is not normal, people's expectations are way too high.
  • notacop31337 4y ago
    Can you explain more what you mean? I'm unsure where you're making your point from.
    • rr888 4y ago
      Like what is happening at twitter. For a startup working until 1am was pretty normal. Lots of 100 hours weeks. Working a 40 hour week to me seems like slacking. This whole attitude of 4 day weeks, or just a few hours a day seems completely crazy, I dont think it will last.
• sgt101 4y ago
  >HR should define the perfect workweek wot? >HR professionals must carry the torch for this issue. bruv....
• davesque 4y ago
  I've always felt a bit like an alien from outer space when trying to understand the work habits of modern humans. It seems we spend enough time doing what we think we have to do to survive that it feels like the only thing we actually do. Everything else in our life feels secondary. I'm not sure this is even normal in nature. Seems like a lot of animals spend much of their time just sort of hanging out. Does it honestly take so much time to cover your bases? I think not. It feels as though the modern 9-5 lifestyle is a lie that no one questions. I just can't get behind it as long as I feel like our society doesn't actually require that much constant effort to maintain or even to keep pointed in the right direction.
  • CBarkleyU 4y ago
    "The lion never says "It took me 15 minutes to hunt the antelope, if I keep at it, I might hunt 4 more down -- wait I could actually take tomorrow off!" -- The lion isnt stupid, he didn't go to business school. Au contraire, lion is much smarter than the MBA, he knows that even if he hunted down 5 antelopes today, he still can't take tomorrow off: He has to build a fridge on his day off. On the day following his day off he has to somehow work to get the electricity working, then he has to build a house to protect the fridge and at the end of the day the lion will never have the time to lie in the sun and say "Man, that tasted so good, how lucky am I?". Only a human can be tricked into thinking like that" Volker Pispers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysGB9yXE_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysGB9yXE_g)
    • chii 4y ago
      That's civilization, and it is the thing that allowed humans to survive better than lions, despite being physically weaker and less hardy.
      • davesque 4y ago
        Agree completely. My point was that I feel like it doesn't actually take so much effort to maintain that we have to feel strung out all the time. I imagine we could continue to survive and thrive quite effectively with far less effort directed in the right way. We seem to continue to hustle to survive but the notion of survival is ingrown and only really has meaning within the context of humanity. The broader notion of survival, against the elements, seems like a solved problem.
• nelsonenzo 4y ago
  sooooo....is Okta trialing a 30hour work week? Or just writing developer friendly fluff as free advertising?
• therealasdf 4y ago
  yes
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• leoh 4y ago
  Shouldn’t it just really be contextual? Sometimes work a lot, sometimes a little. Depending on the project, time to relax and gain clarity, burnout—lots of other variables?
• P_I_Staker 4y ago
  No, but I think it should be 40 hrs including transit, and overhead time; yes I would even include walking around, if it's a large facility. For whatever reason I have to walk pretty far for drinks and bathrooms... so it counts. It goes with out saying that there's some flexibility for appointments and personal matters. You don't have work extra hours after going to your doctor for cancer (extreme example there are smaller).
• gloosx 4y ago
  40 hours is just a handy figure, like eight hours is a third of a day, third you spend on sleeping, third you spend on life, third you spend on work. I believe it was established due to these equal ratios. We kinda all work in manufacturing still, just the goods we manufacture have changed, yet we still spend about equal part of our life on it, probably due to strong tradition. Some are seeing 20 hour "void" in their third, cause really they want to spend 20 more hours on something else.
• vladibern 4y ago
  40-hours week is more of an artefact from the times when the labour unions were fighting for a normalised work week and fair pay.
• rrgok 4y ago
  In my stupidity, I've never understood when the 40h, or any X hour per week for that matter, became a requirement per law, instead of an upper limit for health safety. For example, some different type of roads have different upper speed LIMIT. They also have a minimum required speed. Nobody is forced to drive at the upper limit constantly. Today is not a good day, I'm having hard time putting my thoughts into words. Moreover, I think it would be good to shift from hourly salary to daily salary. Whether you work 1h or 50hr in a particular day, it shouldn't matter, you should be paid for the day. We never say my hourly living cost when we talk about living expense, instead we say daily living cost. Which is a better metric in my opinion. One day of work should at least guarentee one day of living cost. This should be a LAW, that every employment (indipendently of hours) should guarentee per LAW the living expenses for a day. It might be hard for some kind of jobs, I understand. But I think we can do better than getting paid hourly. I live with my parents, so I can save some money. Honeslty, I just need $30 to eat 2 healthy meals and $15 for rent a day. How much hours is that for a Software Engineer, 1-2hrs of work with a lot of extra money. Why should I slave away the rest 6-7hrs? This also helps with my creativity, because I cannot pre-allocate and command my brain to be creative for the allotted time, excatly from 9am to 5pm.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• incomingpain 4y ago
  Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks. https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we... Keynes is right, we should be at around 15 hours per week right now. It's not even a nostradamus prediction, it should have happened. The division of labour, specialization of production and dexterity, and technology has greatly increased productivity. The answer is globalization, something Keynes didn't think could happen due to diplomacy of his time. So the 'western' world could be at 15 hour weeks but globalization has kept us up high. As these other countries have developed and are starting to industrialize. Pulling people out of poverty and greatly increasing quality of life has been great. It's making us wealthier than ever. We live in a time of abundance. Shouldn't it be possible to live a life on fewer hours?
• huqedato 4y ago
  YES. For our epoch it is. Max 20hrs/week in combination with remote-working should be the future.