14 ms·

Bring back the 40-hour work week

77 points by callmeed 15y ago

swampthing 15y ago
The 'knowledge worker' section would be a lot more convincing if it provided citations.
- magicalist 15y ago
  there are several links in there citing sources, the second of which is to a paper from the author's relative(? spouse?), which it explicitly notes "contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week": http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
  - swampthing 15y ago
    Sorry, I meant to write about the 'knowledge worker' section in particular. I've edited to reflect that. The only cite in that section is supposedly to a US military study but actually goes to a findarticles.com page that doesn't directly support the statement being cited and that makes no reference to said study.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  A larger question would be whether integrative living (i.e. working from home, spending your coffee breaks with your kids) impacts the optimal level of work. I would bet that knowledge workers burn out FASTER from being overworked than manual laborers. Knowledge work, particularly the inductive side, relies on downtime in order to stay productive.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    I'm guessing that having a shitty boss affects manual workers about as much as knowledge workers. Production drops; errors increase; sick leave increases; levels of stress are spread to colleagues; etc.
  - steve-howard 15y ago
    Overtime and burnout were covered in Peopleware back in 1987. Looks like we're doomed to relearn our lessons again and again...
    - einhverfr 15y ago
      But my experience is that I burn out a lot slower if I am working at home and taking my breaks with my family. So that is a different circumstance not covered in such work.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- carboncrank 15y ago
  Totally agree and I'd go further. I struggled to get past the tendentiousness of the sentence: "Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work." Which is obviously just BS on stilts (not to mention an insult to myriad researchers).
tricolon 15y ago
This is the original article: http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/ http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_bac...
Jebus 15y ago
If the boss asks me to work 50 hours, I work 30. True story
- markokocic 15y ago
  But you still sit at work 50 hours, or you go home after 30 hours? It's true that I'd rather go home after 30 hours instead after 50 hours, but it's also true that I would be bored to death just sitting at work and doing nothing those extra 20 hours.
  - danmaz74 15y ago
    [Irony]Isn't that what Hacker News is for??[/Irony]
zeroonetwothree 15y ago
I find I get about as much done "working" 60 hours as 30.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
One of my thesis committee members told me after I finished that I did not like working for bosses unless they were very very smart. This article reminds me that working as a consultant beats working as an employee. It also reminds me why I generally detest bosses. The thought of being stuck with a brain that could think approvingly about "keeping butts in chairs" in those smug unlettered terms fills me with pity and horror.
nasmorn 15y ago
I really like days where I put in those 5 to 6 perfect hours and then instead of the meetings and email I just go hone.
- gedekran 15y ago
  What are you honing?
  - jimfl 15y ago
    Typing skills.
robinduckett 15y ago
Sorry, when did they ever go away?
scrrr 15y ago
I think overtime is often the consequence of managers that don't know when or how to say "no" to client's demands.
Zakharov 15y ago
And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law. The rest of the article says that 50-hour-a-week employees are no more productive than 40-hour-a-week employees, and don't get paid any more. Where do the extra jobs come from?
- batista 15y ago
  So, it's not one in four, it's one it ten. How about that?
- maushu 15y ago
  You are confusing productivity as a measure for the number of jobs. We use man-hours as the measure for the number of jobs, so, if 4 people working 50 (hours a week) start working 40 that leaves 40 hours to be filled by another person (1 more job). Productivity actually increases even if the man-hours are the same.
stusmith1977 15y ago
...but I'm quite happy with my 35-hour week, thankyou. There's a lot that's wrong with the UK, but being forced to work for free thankfully isn't one of them. I just can't imagine where people get the time for a 50-60 hour week. Once I've been to work, played with my son, fed, bathed, and put him to bed, and cooked, there isn't much time left in the day, surely?
- bmuon 15y ago
  Exactly. Where I live (Argentina) we have a 40 hour week that usually turns at least into 45 hours because most people work from 9 to 18 with an hour for lunch in the middle. Working part-time after a long time of full time work my eyes opened to the possibility of the 36-hour week. I usually discuss with a lot of people how they feel about their work schedule and what they think about working 6 hours in 6 days instead of 9 in 5, and surprisingly most defend the 40-hour week because they prefer two days of rest. In my experience, they're overrated. The possibility of dedicating time to yourself, your projects, your family, throughout the week is priceless.
kamaal 15y ago
Fact is, I'm productive with a 8 hour a day schedule if and only if: 1. What I need to do is clear and known. 2. I've been doing the is same everytime or something of similar pattern. 3. No meetings and distractions in between. But the fact is, none of this is true in our area of work. To some extent even if something similar exists it wont work for many reasons. For every person who wants to go back home, there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning. By the well known rate of success coming at an near exponential rate to people to work hard and are productive, the rate becomes exponential if they add crazy work hours to it. Building stuff requires a goal. Then implementation, experimentation, test a feed back loop and then back to implementation. And then this cycle goes on in iteration. This requires tuits(Uninterrupted large workable free chunks of time) to allow a degree of focus and flow seep into the person. And most of tuits are generally available only early in the morning or in the night. This by default means you already agree to work crazy hours. So in summary, I can't do a 40 hour work week because 1. I will loose out to my peers in the long term race. 2. Meetings. 3. My work requires genuine supply of atleast two big tuits a day to remain competitive and have a good growth both money and career wise.
- DanBC 15y ago
  > there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning For every peer putting in stupid hours innovating, building and learning there are > 1 peers putting in stupid hours fixing errors of other overworked colleagues or just grinding through the stuff they could have done in 40 hours if they didn't have an asshole boss / broken business culture.
  - kamaal 15y ago
    I don't know why you consider working hard as a broken culture.
    - Ihavenoname 15y ago
      "Lesson Three is this: five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century. What makes us think that our industry is somehow exempt from this rule?" http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
danmaz74 15y ago
I agree with the general thesis of the article, but at least in the software industry there are two big problems with this reasoning. The first is that, notoriously, if one programmer working 50% more time won't advance the project 50% faster, that is even more true if you try to increase by 50% the number of programmers. Software development is incredibly non-linear (and as a project manager I always have to struggle with my manager about this - it is incredible how much linear thinking is ingrained in so many people's minds). The second problem is that, also notoriously, software developers vary incredibly in individual productivity, much more than hourly wages do. So, where engineering (not just software) work prevails on other kinds of work, a few geeks working very long hours can really be more productive than more people working less hours. But this does NOT work in most other environments, and even in software development: - there is a lot of repetitive work to do that real geeks aren't going to do - there aren't enough geeks to do all the software development that our societies require In the end, one size doesn't fit all, and solving this situation with regulation would be very difficult (even if some better regulation could help, especially if it could make unpaid overtime much more difficult/risky for employers). The best chance would be to have one or more very convincing examples, like Ford was almost a century ago. Any candidates?
- DanBC 15y ago
  You have a programmer who works for 13 hours a day. That programmer does three days in a row of 13 hours. That's 39 hours, not including any travel etc. Give / force them some time off before they can start another block of 40 hour work. "Flow" is mentioned so often, but I'd really like to see some good quality research to back it up. For sure people feel like they're in a zone, but how much of the code produced in that time is great quality, and how much is error-strewn garbage? The need for standard weeks is still pretty strong, but that's not insurmountable problem. Really, when people talk of weeks they mean "continuous chunk of work with no 48 hour break". A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.
  - 15y ago
mathattack 15y ago
Any contention on this topic should be solvable in the market. Companies and managers that believe in the 40 hour week fight it out with companies and managers who don't. (This decision is made by managers - though employees have to agree) Different people have different amounts to give at different stages in their life. Let the market decide which approach is more enlightened, and let people decide how much they want to work.
jacobr 15y ago
My standard work week is 37.5 hours, but Thursdays and Fridays I work half days, and from home, to spend extra time with my son, so it's currently 30 hours a week. I asked my team leader if she thought it was going ok, and her response was "it's not much more time away than a couple of unnecessary meetings". It has also given me some time to work on projects on my free time that ultimately can be of benefit to the company, sort of unpayed 20% innovation time. But since I am grateful for the company being so flexible and understanding, I don't mind.
michaelochurch 15y ago
In technology, I actually think it makes sense for metered work demands (i.e things a person is told to do by management or clients, as opposed to learning new technologies, going to conferences, contributing to open-source) to top out around 25 hours per week. Even that's pushing it. The other 15-30 should be more open, long-term focused, and self-directed (because this component of the workweek is more autonomous, people can sustainably total 50+ hours without ruining their health, if these autonomy conditions at met). The reason that management in most companies doesn't recognize this is that, although the average worker could achieve as much in his or her best 4 hours, managers are afraid that if they did officially relaxed "metered" demands, people would use their best hours on side projects or career-focused efforts and throw the scraps to their metered work (and, in many environments, they're right). The reason for the 8 to 11 hour metered workday is to maximize the likelihood that these 3-4 peak hours per day occur somewhere in that window.
namenotrequired 15y ago
Personally, I used to work 40 hours a week, and felt that was enough and I shouldn't have taken on more. Then again I do a lot of volunteer work as well besides that, but it's something I love, and something I can do from home whenever I want and have the time. And as I live with my parents, I don't have a family to look after or anything, so it feels like that comes in the place of looking after my house and family etc. Now they cut hours at my job and I work only 30, and I'd like to work 40 again. I find I often don't really do anything with those 10 extra free hours and I get less money.
jdietrich 15y ago
I keep reading these sort of articles and wondering why the American people seem so opposed to basic employment law. Here in Socialist Yurop, the Working Time Directive means that no employer can compel an employee to work for longer than 48 hours per week. All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday. You all seem to agree that you work too long and don't get enough holiday. I've never once heard anyone say that they're happy with two weeks vacation and unpaid overtime. I'm not asking rhetorically, I genuinely want to know why the most basic sort of collective bargaining is absent from the political culture of the US.
- ordinary 15y ago
  All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday. This is incorrect. In the Netherlands, at least, 20 days is the legal minimum, though most people get 25.
  - desas 15y ago
    In the UK the minimum is 20 days. A significant proportion of people get 25 days + 8 public holidays
- jbarham 15y ago
  Given that e.g. the unemployment rate in Spain is 23% [1] and Greece is bankrupt, it seems a little quixotic to be highlighting European entitlements for workers, when the more pressing problem is obviously the huge numbers of people who are not working and cannot find work and to whom those entitlements are a bad joke. Indeed, some people might even posit a link between entitlements and the current economic mess in Europe... 1. http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/03/spains-budget-deficit http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/03/spains-budge...
  - rimantas 15y ago
    How about Germany, Norway, Sweden? I don't know about Spain, but 40 hours week was least of Greece's problem.
Shivetya 15y ago
I believe hours worked is only relevant to the type of work being done. Yet I think it is overall unrealistic to expect a forty hour week. Having been raised on a farm I know that forty hour weeks are a vacation to some, even now self employed people would scoff at forty hours. We have great examples of what happened to many of these prized union jobs that limited work to forty hours on top of rules that prevented people from doing "other people's work". Not many of them are good, hence they moved into government jobs where there it is much harder to bankrupt the employer for lack of production. You work forty hours a week to be average. No one I know who is well off works only forty hours a week. Now they don't do the same tasks all those hours but they are doing something. The key is making sure the hours you put in are beneficial not just "doing work". The rest of the world certainly isn't going to work just forty hours a week. They upcoming economies are going to put in whatever it takes to get where they want to be. Those of us who sit back and claim enlightenment by denouncing such hours are only going to end up being passed by.
- jwingy 15y ago
  These concerns are addressed in the article. tl;dr Working hours longer than 40 leads to counter productivity in the short and long term. 40 hour workers are more productive in all situations except those where workers have an abnormal singular focus (apparently symptoms of aspergers).
- rimantas 15y ago
  > Those of us who sit back and claim enlightenment by > denouncing such hours are only going to end up being > passed by. There is huge huge huge difference between working smarter and just sitting back.
lrobb 15y ago
In the renowned 1993 study of young violinists, performance researcher Anders Ericsson found that the best ones all practiced the same way: in the morning, in three increments of no more than 90 minutes each, with a break between each one. Ericcson found the same pattern among other musicians, athletes, chess players and writers. For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/05/for-real-productivity-less-is.html http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/05/for-real-productivity-... . I don't expect 'managers' to understand this... Mythical Man Month is nearing on 40 years old, and apparently the current crop of tech leaders haven't bothered to read it.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  > Mythical Man Month is nearing on 40 years old, and apparently the current crop of tech leaders haven't bothered to read it. +100. That and Peopleware.
- kamaal 15y ago
  This is true provided you have to master the instrument. Not when you compose music. They are two different things. Typing is not the same as programing. I learned to type real fast long back. But I'm still learning the art of programming.
  - lrobb 15y ago
    You obviously didn't bother to read the article or it's references.
functionoid 15y ago
If it bothers someone to work extra they should not be doing that work. Because it means you are doing something you do not love. I do not mean to say you have to slave for 80 hours week but let's be honest when you want to create something you have to dig down and put efforts more than others that could mean working smart and putting more effort than others. This just does not apply to developers it is same at wall street. Those who want to be at the top of their game are not there for money only they take satisfaction in their achievements and achieving goals.

77 points by callmeed 15y ago

swampthing 15y ago

The 'knowledge worker' section would be a lot more convincing if it provided citations.

magicalist 15y ago
there are several links in there citing sources, the second of which is to a paper from the author's relative(? spouse?), which it explicitly notes "contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week": http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
- swampthing 15y ago
  Sorry, I meant to write about the 'knowledge worker' section in particular. I've edited to reflect that. The only cite in that section is supposedly to a US military study but actually goes to a findarticles.com page that doesn't directly support the statement being cited and that makes no reference to said study.
einhverfr 15y ago
A larger question would be whether integrative living (i.e. working from home, spending your coffee breaks with your kids) impacts the optimal level of work. I would bet that knowledge workers burn out FASTER from being overworked than manual laborers. Knowledge work, particularly the inductive side, relies on downtime in order to stay productive.
- DanBC 15y ago
  I'm guessing that having a shitty boss affects manual workers about as much as knowledge workers. Production drops; errors increase; sick leave increases; levels of stress are spread to colleagues; etc.
- steve-howard 15y ago
  Overtime and burnout were covered in Peopleware back in 1987. Looks like we're doomed to relearn our lessons again and again...
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    But my experience is that I burn out a lot slower if I am working at home and taking my breaks with my family. So that is a different circumstance not covered in such work.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
carboncrank 15y ago
Totally agree and I'd go further. I struggled to get past the tendentiousness of the sentence: "Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work." Which is obviously just BS on stilts (not to mention an insult to myriad researchers).

tricolon 15y ago

This is the original article: http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/ http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_bac...

Jebus 15y ago

If the boss asks me to work 50 hours, I work 30. True story

markokocic 15y ago
But you still sit at work 50 hours, or you go home after 30 hours? It's true that I'd rather go home after 30 hours instead after 50 hours, but it's also true that I would be bored to death just sitting at work and doing nothing those extra 20 hours.
- danmaz74 15y ago
  [Irony]Isn't that what Hacker News is for??[/Irony]

zeroonetwothree 15y ago

I find I get about as much done "working" 60 hours as 30.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

One of my thesis committee members told me after I finished that I did not like working for bosses unless they were very very smart. This article reminds me that working as a consultant beats working as an employee. It also reminds me why I generally detest bosses. The thought of being stuck with a brain that could think approvingly about "keeping butts in chairs" in those smug unlettered terms fills me with pity and horror.

nasmorn 15y ago

I really like days where I put in those 5 to 6 perfect hours and then instead of the meetings and email I just go hone.

gedekran 15y ago
What are you honing?
- jimfl 15y ago
  Typing skills.

robinduckett 15y ago

Sorry, when did they ever go away?

scrrr 15y ago

I think overtime is often the consequence of managers that don't know when or how to say "no" to client's demands.

Zakharov 15y ago

And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law. The rest of the article says that 50-hour-a-week employees are no more productive than 40-hour-a-week employees, and don't get paid any more. Where do the extra jobs come from?

batista 15y ago
So, it's not one in four, it's one it ten. How about that?
maushu 15y ago
You are confusing productivity as a measure for the number of jobs. We use man-hours as the measure for the number of jobs, so, if 4 people working 50 (hours a week) start working 40 that leaves 40 hours to be filled by another person (1 more job). Productivity actually increases even if the man-hours are the same.

stusmith1977 15y ago

...but I'm quite happy with my 35-hour week, thankyou. There's a lot that's wrong with the UK, but being forced to work for free thankfully isn't one of them. I just can't imagine where people get the time for a 50-60 hour week. Once I've been to work, played with my son, fed, bathed, and put him to bed, and cooked, there isn't much time left in the day, surely?

bmuon 15y ago
Exactly. Where I live (Argentina) we have a 40 hour week that usually turns at least into 45 hours because most people work from 9 to 18 with an hour for lunch in the middle. Working part-time after a long time of full time work my eyes opened to the possibility of the 36-hour week. I usually discuss with a lot of people how they feel about their work schedule and what they think about working 6 hours in 6 days instead of 9 in 5, and surprisingly most defend the 40-hour week because they prefer two days of rest. In my experience, they're overrated. The possibility of dedicating time to yourself, your projects, your family, throughout the week is priceless.

kamaal 15y ago

Fact is, I'm productive with a 8 hour a day schedule if and only if: 1. What I need to do is clear and known. 2. I've been doing the is same everytime or something of similar pattern. 3. No meetings and distractions in between. But the fact is, none of this is true in our area of work. To some extent even if something similar exists it wont work for many reasons. For every person who wants to go back home, there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning. By the well known rate of success coming at an near exponential rate to people to work hard and are productive, the rate becomes exponential if they add crazy work hours to it. Building stuff requires a goal. Then implementation, experimentation, test a feed back loop and then back to implementation. And then this cycle goes on in iteration. This requires tuits(Uninterrupted large workable free chunks of time) to allow a degree of focus and flow seep into the person. And most of tuits are generally available only early in the morning or in the night. This by default means you already agree to work crazy hours. So in summary, I can't do a 40 hour work week because 1. I will loose out to my peers in the long term race. 2. Meetings. 3. My work requires genuine supply of atleast two big tuits a day to remain competitive and have a good growth both money and career wise.

DanBC 15y ago
> there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning For every peer putting in stupid hours innovating, building and learning there are > 1 peers putting in stupid hours fixing errors of other overworked colleagues or just grinding through the stuff they could have done in 40 hours if they didn't have an asshole boss / broken business culture.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I don't know why you consider working hard as a broken culture.
  - Ihavenoname 15y ago
    "Lesson Three is this: five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century. What makes us think that our industry is somehow exempt from this rule?" http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

danmaz74 15y ago

I agree with the general thesis of the article, but at least in the software industry there are two big problems with this reasoning. The first is that, notoriously, if one programmer working 50% more time won't advance the project 50% faster, that is even more true if you try to increase by 50% the number of programmers. Software development is incredibly non-linear (and as a project manager I always have to struggle with my manager about this - it is incredible how much linear thinking is ingrained in so many people's minds). The second problem is that, also notoriously, software developers vary incredibly in individual productivity, much more than hourly wages do. So, where engineering (not just software) work prevails on other kinds of work, a few geeks working very long hours can really be more productive than more people working less hours. But this does NOT work in most other environments, and even in software development: - there is a lot of repetitive work to do that real geeks aren't going to do - there aren't enough geeks to do all the software development that our societies require In the end, one size doesn't fit all, and solving this situation with regulation would be very difficult (even if some better regulation could help, especially if it could make unpaid overtime much more difficult/risky for employers). The best chance would be to have one or more very convincing examples, like Ford was almost a century ago. Any candidates?

DanBC 15y ago
You have a programmer who works for 13 hours a day. That programmer does three days in a row of 13 hours. That's 39 hours, not including any travel etc. Give / force them some time off before they can start another block of 40 hour work. "Flow" is mentioned so often, but I'd really like to see some good quality research to back it up. For sure people feel like they're in a zone, but how much of the code produced in that time is great quality, and how much is error-strewn garbage? The need for standard weeks is still pretty strong, but that's not insurmountable problem. Really, when people talk of weeks they mean "continuous chunk of work with no 48 hour break". A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.
- 15y ago

mathattack 15y ago

Any contention on this topic should be solvable in the market. Companies and managers that believe in the 40 hour week fight it out with companies and managers who don't. (This decision is made by managers - though employees have to agree) Different people have different amounts to give at different stages in their life. Let the market decide which approach is more enlightened, and let people decide how much they want to work.

jacobr 15y ago

My standard work week is 37.5 hours, but Thursdays and Fridays I work half days, and from home, to spend extra time with my son, so it's currently 30 hours a week. I asked my team leader if she thought it was going ok, and her response was "it's not much more time away than a couple of unnecessary meetings". It has also given me some time to work on projects on my free time that ultimately can be of benefit to the company, sort of unpayed 20% innovation time. But since I am grateful for the company being so flexible and understanding, I don't mind.

michaelochurch 15y ago

In technology, I actually think it makes sense for metered work demands (i.e things a person is told to do by management or clients, as opposed to learning new technologies, going to conferences, contributing to open-source) to top out around 25 hours per week. Even that's pushing it. The other 15-30 should be more open, long-term focused, and self-directed (because this component of the workweek is more autonomous, people can sustainably total 50+ hours without ruining their health, if these autonomy conditions at met). The reason that management in most companies doesn't recognize this is that, although the average worker could achieve as much in his or her best 4 hours, managers are afraid that if they did officially relaxed "metered" demands, people would use their best hours on side projects or career-focused efforts and throw the scraps to their metered work (and, in many environments, they're right). The reason for the 8 to 11 hour metered workday is to maximize the likelihood that these 3-4 peak hours per day occur somewhere in that window.

namenotrequired 15y ago

Personally, I used to work 40 hours a week, and felt that was enough and I shouldn't have taken on more. Then again I do a lot of volunteer work as well besides that, but it's something I love, and something I can do from home whenever I want and have the time. And as I live with my parents, I don't have a family to look after or anything, so it feels like that comes in the place of looking after my house and family etc. Now they cut hours at my job and I work only 30, and I'd like to work 40 again. I find I often don't really do anything with those 10 extra free hours and I get less money.

jdietrich 15y ago

I keep reading these sort of articles and wondering why the American people seem so opposed to basic employment law. Here in Socialist Yurop, the Working Time Directive means that no employer can compel an employee to work for longer than 48 hours per week. All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday. You all seem to agree that you work too long and don't get enough holiday. I've never once heard anyone say that they're happy with two weeks vacation and unpaid overtime. I'm not asking rhetorically, I genuinely want to know why the most basic sort of collective bargaining is absent from the political culture of the US.

ordinary 15y ago
All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday. This is incorrect. In the Netherlands, at least, 20 days is the legal minimum, though most people get 25.
- desas 15y ago
  In the UK the minimum is 20 days. A significant proportion of people get 25 days + 8 public holidays
jbarham 15y ago
Given that e.g. the unemployment rate in Spain is 23% [1] and Greece is bankrupt, it seems a little quixotic to be highlighting European entitlements for workers, when the more pressing problem is obviously the huge numbers of people who are not working and cannot find work and to whom those entitlements are a bad joke. Indeed, some people might even posit a link between entitlements and the current economic mess in Europe... 1. http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/03/spains-budget-deficit http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/03/spains-budge...
- rimantas 15y ago
  How about Germany, Norway, Sweden? I don't know about Spain, but 40 hours week was least of Greece's problem.

Shivetya 15y ago

I believe hours worked is only relevant to the type of work being done. Yet I think it is overall unrealistic to expect a forty hour week. Having been raised on a farm I know that forty hour weeks are a vacation to some, even now self employed people would scoff at forty hours. We have great examples of what happened to many of these prized union jobs that limited work to forty hours on top of rules that prevented people from doing "other people's work". Not many of them are good, hence they moved into government jobs where there it is much harder to bankrupt the employer for lack of production. You work forty hours a week to be average. No one I know who is well off works only forty hours a week. Now they don't do the same tasks all those hours but they are doing something. The key is making sure the hours you put in are beneficial not just "doing work". The rest of the world certainly isn't going to work just forty hours a week. They upcoming economies are going to put in whatever it takes to get where they want to be. Those of us who sit back and claim enlightenment by denouncing such hours are only going to end up being passed by.

jwingy 15y ago
These concerns are addressed in the article. tl;dr Working hours longer than 40 leads to counter productivity in the short and long term. 40 hour workers are more productive in all situations except those where workers have an abnormal singular focus (apparently symptoms of aspergers).
rimantas 15y ago
> Those of us who sit back and claim enlightenment by > denouncing such hours are only going to end up being > passed by. There is huge huge huge difference between working smarter and just sitting back.

lrobb 15y ago

In the renowned 1993 study of young violinists, performance researcher Anders Ericsson found that the best ones all practiced the same way: in the morning, in three increments of no more than 90 minutes each, with a break between each one. Ericcson found the same pattern among other musicians, athletes, chess players and writers. For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/05/for-real-productivity-less-is.html http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/05/for-real-productivity-... . I don't expect 'managers' to understand this... Mythical Man Month is nearing on 40 years old, and apparently the current crop of tech leaders haven't bothered to read it.

SkyMarshal 15y ago
> Mythical Man Month is nearing on 40 years old, and apparently the current crop of tech leaders haven't bothered to read it. +100. That and Peopleware.
kamaal 15y ago
This is true provided you have to master the instrument. Not when you compose music. They are two different things. Typing is not the same as programing. I learned to type real fast long back. But I'm still learning the art of programming.
- lrobb 15y ago
  You obviously didn't bother to read the article or it's references.

functionoid 15y ago

If it bothers someone to work extra they should not be doing that work. Because it means you are doing something you do not love. I do not mean to say you have to slave for 80 hours week but let's be honest when you want to create something you have to dig down and put efforts more than others that could mean working smart and putting more effort than others. This just does not apply to developers it is same at wall street. Those who want to be at the top of their game are not there for money only they take satisfaction in their achievements and achieving goals.