18 ms·

Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

304 points by pnathan 14y ago

rohern 14y ago
We could do quite a bit better than that. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
psycho 14y ago
Forget about "any-number-hour week" - each one has his own work regime and in startups especially you work not for counting hours, I guess.
- scott_meade 14y ago
  The point of the article is that you should be counting hours. Even if the hours themselves are not your goal or measure, there are still physiological reasons that too many hours are non-optimal. Even and in some respects, especially for, knowledge workers. Too few hours and not much gets done. Too many hours and you're wasting money and effort while harming quality.
wombleton 14y ago
I honestly thought it would be arguing to go up to 40 hours.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  That kind of article would feature a *.fr TLD.
rdl 14y ago
Reducing commute and other wasted time is probably still the low hanging fruit for most people. If your work is sufficiently varied, I don't see how 60-80h/wk is unsustainable at at least 1.5x the work you'd accomplish in 40h, if (and only if) the other hassles of life are taken care of for you -- no cleaning, commute time, etc. I don't think I could do a single task for 80h/wk productively, but I could certainly do my primary job for 40-60h/wk productively and then spend 20h/wk doing meetings with users, conferences, etc.
- otakucode 14y ago
  But should you? Your employer will not reward you for it with anything that could be considered reasonable when compared to the value you are creating for them. What people can do, and what employers are willing to pay for, are two very different things. Employers, by and large, have adopted a strategy of paying employees as little as possible, divorcing their compensation from the value of their work. Capitalism says that employers should receive as little work of as little value as possible in return.
  - NoPiece 14y ago
    If everyone had your attitude, then employers would be justified in paying as little as possible. Thankfully my experience has been that most co-workers don't try to provide as little value as possible, and most employers actively try to reward value (with varying success at evaluating it).
  - liber8 14y ago
    I'm not sure where your definition of Capitalism is coming from, but nothing about capitalism or free markets requires (or even predicts) that workers will be paid commensurate to the value they create. Workers are paid based on supply and demand. If moving a pile of manure from one side of a parking lot to the other will net me $100,000,000, that doesn't mean the laborer I hire to move the manure will share in the value created by moving the manure. This is because the pool of laborers willing and able to do the job is roughly 4 billion people (or more accurately, tens of thousands of people in the immediate vicinity). Competition ensures that a laborer will be willing to move the manure for (roughly $15/hour here in Southern California), regardless of the ultimate value the work produces for me. On the other hand, if a Steve Jobsian/Jony Ive figure creates a series of industry dominating products from whole cloth, he may get to share in a huge percentage of the value created by those products, simply because there are only a handful of people on the planet capable of creating those products, and thus the employer is willing to pay his $100,000,000 salary.
    - king_jester 14y ago
otakucode 14y ago
40 hours? No. Average worker productivity has skyrocketed since 1980 with the introduction of computers and automation technology. Salaries have remained flat. A 20 hour work week with the same salary would be far more reasonable (though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce).
- mylons 14y ago
  this, 1000x this.
- crusso 14y ago
  though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce Employees aren't really compensated for increases in output that are achieved through standard business practices, technology, automation, etc. That's because their relative input remains the same. Same input, same salaries. If I'm starting a business mass-producing widgets and I fund the machinery, process development, and software to produce that -- why should I pay extra for the employee who really only has to push the big red button to start the machines going every morning? Just because a lot of value is produced when he pushes that red button doesn't mean that he should be highly compensated.
  - dsr_ 14y ago
    You shouldn't. You should push that button yourself in the morning, and save the salary entirely. Consequences are left as an exercise for the student.
  - morsch 14y ago
    In that case, you will be forced to drop prices, because your competitor's are probably doing the same (otherwise you'll run out of employees rsn). If prices are falling across the board, people don't need to earn wages as high as before since they can reproduce themselves at the same level with less income. I'm not sure there's any value to this kind of armchair economics.
    - 14y ago
drewblaisdell 14y ago
Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part-time job or downsizing your position at a company? Every listing for part-time I see seems to be for someone with a lesser skillset.
- theabraham 14y ago
  Seems like a good time to build a hefty savings and begin investing. I think if you were to go part-time, you'd lose some of your benefits. And if your employer is used to you working 40-hours, you might end up working more than 20-hours due to a higher workload. Depends on your situation, and it can't hurt to bring it up. Maybe try winding down your hours progressively.
  - philsnow 14y ago
    I think he _does_ want to invest, but in experiences during his early 20s, rather than by building his finances.
    - nathan_f77 14y ago
      I think many of the HN crowd has a slightly different mindset, since a lot of us are entrepreneurs. I'm in my early 20s, and am about to start working 40+ hour weeks for an early-stage startup. To me, this work _is_ a great experience. There's also the very small chance that we'll make it big and I'll be able to 'retire' and focus on my other passions. Even if we crash and burn, I won't consider that time wasted. The lessons learned will be invaluable, but I also hope to save enough to travel the world for a while, no matter what happens. 20 hour work weeks don't usually lead to more life experiences, in my experience. You just have more time to focus on side-projects or hobbies. You'll still be 'working' 40+ hour weeks, but dividing your time between different projects. As someone commented before, if he wanted experiences, then he should take a few months of unpaid leave of absence, and go exploring the world.
jonsen 14y ago
I once saw a tv documentary about the CEO of a big danish company. She worked 40 hours per week, and to that she commented: "If I couldn't get done what is expected of me in the allotted time frame, I wouldn't have the competence required for my position."
- jeffool 14y ago
  I once saw a janitor who always had more work to do. She worked 40 hours a week and then did the extra that the boss asked her about on any given day. She could've told him that cleaning desks wasn't in the contract. Or she could've reported the overtime. But not everyone has those kinds of luxuries if they want to keep their jobs. Some jobs always have more shit to shovel, be it actual shit or feature creep. And some people will always expect you to shovel more next quarter/year.
  - stephen_g 14y ago
    I think the point is that people should have the luxury to only work 40 hours, and/or properly report overtime and keep their jobs. Over here if an employer forced one employee to work more than 38 hours a single week, they could be fined up to $6,600. Firing a worker for not working more than that would be unfair dismissal and attract more fines, prosecution etc... There are provisions for reasonable overtime, but cleaning desks wouldn't fall into that unless it was some kind of emergency... And the employee can work overtime if they want (and are paid for it or get time-in-leiu) but they can't be expected to.
    - joonix 14y ago
      They can get this luxury, if they unionize. But Americans won't tolerate any such thing, nor will they strive for it. The culture in America is all about slaving away as much as you can, either out of fear of losing your job or desire to be promoted up the ranks (with the reward of even more work). They make very few demands of their employers because they are told by our society that they should just be happy they have a job. The best ways to gain leverage over employers that I can think of, short of unionizing or passing broad regulation: free basic healthcare coverage provided by the government to all, and a strong economy. An ability to leave your job without fear that if you get sick you will die/bankrupt will do wonders. An ability to leave your job because the demand for labor outstrips supply will make employers compete by offering better perks, compensation, benefits, work environments, etc (already the case in high tech).
enraged_camel 14y ago
I think we need to stop counting hours worked and start measuring results instead.
- jonsen 14y ago
  Sure, it's just that in many cases reliable, fair, and accurate result meters are not invented yet.
- brixon 14y ago
  More than half the population would take a serious pay cut. In reality, I think they would if you could measure results easily without gaming.
- latortuga 14y ago
  There's this almost cult-like obsession with measurement among the hacker crowd where everything must be measured and optimized. Unfortunately, people don't work this way. Telling people that they haven't measured up to some arbitrary standard is a significant demotivator. If you are measuring your workers on some chart, they'll begin either gaming the chart or comparing against each other, neither of which will motivate them to do better work - it will motivate them to optimize whatever you're measuring. I saw this at my last job and it was blindingly, painfully obvious how bad of an idea it was but management kept it up. Take a support staff for example. What do you measure? How many calls they make? That incentivizes making lots of short calls. How many notes about clients calls they made? That incentivizes leaving lots of minimum length notes. Am I a worse support staff member if I leave longer notes and make longer calls? How do you accurately measure the "results" of a support staff? By customer retention? Good luck correlating individual client retention to specific support staff when customers talk to many different employees during a sales or support process. Once you get past people who create objective value for the company, measurements are difficult to impossible. Measuring against an arbitrary standard is worse than doing nothing because it demotivates employees who aren't as high up on your arbitrary standard. Not everyone at a company has a direct impact on revenue - janitor, accountant, sysadmin, chef, etc.
  - rowsdower 14y ago
bitops 14y ago
Wanting to work fewer hours is something I think we all hope for, but it also depends on what we're after in life. I was reminded of this essay from Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
- deleted 14y ago
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- Joeri 14y ago
  I disagree with this sentence from that article: "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour.". You cannot work double the hours and be more productive. If you work 80 hours on a continual basis, you will get less done than if you worked 40 hours. I have seen smart people reduced to blubbering idiots by the hours they put in through misguided passion. The true productivity benefit from going into business for yourself is not that you can put in more effort. The human capacity for productive work is not that flexible, because we are not machines. The real multiplier is that you can direct your effort at that which truly matters. Most businesses spend 10% of their budget on 90% of their value. If you can work smarter you can get dramatically more done because you are building that which truly matters. That is where the PG article is right. But, here's the problem with what I'm saying: people working crazy hours succeed. Everyone can see that. How can that be explained? In my opinion, those people succeed despite those hours, not because of them. It is their laser-like focus on reaching a goal that makes them succeed, but it is also this focus which makes them put in more hours thinking it brings success home sooner. It don't think it does, but it's almost impossible to prove it doesn't because there just aren't many places where highly passionate and focused people stick religiously to a 40 hour work schedule.
  - crusso 14y ago
    You cannot work double the hours and be more productive You can't simply put typical workers on a schedule that's twice as long and expect more productivity, that's true. Individually, though, you can normally become extraordinarily more productive if you have the right motivation. people working crazy hours succeed. Why is this such a mystery? Haven't you ever thrown yourselves into a new startup or idea and spent every waking hour on it for long periods of time because you were excited by what you were doing and it didn't feel like you were working? Haven't you ever gone to sleep thinking about your ideas, and jumped out of bed right away the next morning like a kid on Christmas and then worked on those ideas, barely wanting to take time to eat, at last breaking away from what you're working on late at night because you know you need to get some sleep? Maybe it's a gene that allows some people to go into that mode. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right motivation. Regardless, it appears that people who don't experience it can't understand it any more than blind people can really appreciate colors.
pnathan 14y ago
I've been on death march projects before; these projects simply burnt people out and quality was atrocious. There's a point where you don't care much about the job, all you want to do is go home and perform $favorite_mindless_relaxation. It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life. I get concerned when I see people celebrate things like weekly hackathons running into the early morning hours, working 60+ hour weeks, etc. Of course it can be needful, but it's also not a sustainable work pace doable for 30-40 years without massive personal issues for the vast majority of people.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life. And your mental hygiene, there's no way you're going to think about (let alone implement) that idea of yours when you're mentally exhausted.
killface 14y ago
This is why any competent computer worker should never accept a salaried position. Sure, it's cool to say "I make 100k/yr!", but it's much cooler to say "I make 65/hr, but I got paid for that 4-hour conference call last night to troubleshoot production"
- jabbernotty 14y ago
  Obviously, one's mileage may vary. As a developer in the country I live in, the only positions are salaried positions.
  - marvin 14y ago
    In countries with good overtime laws, you get overtime even in salaried positions. Where I live, there are _very_ strict laws about what constitutes overtime, and the limit is at 40 hours per week. For any work beyond that, you must get paid by the hour and get at least a 40% bonus above what you would normally make. If you do not get this, you can sue your employer and will win. It is possible to get exceptions to this law, but no exceptions are possible on an individual basis - they must be negotiated across whole groups of employees by a labor organization. Such agreements allow certain groups of workers to 80 and 90-hour weeks, but the conditions and payment are very strictly negotiated. Another exception is for owners and founders. Consequently, overtime is only used where strictly necessary. I think this is an excellent system to protect the rights of laborers.
allsystemsgo 14y ago
This may work among programmers, software developers, etc. But in other more structured environments [management consulting, public accounting, I-banking, etc] a 40 hour work week will almost never be the norm. Sure, more resources could be added to the project, but the budget doesn't support that, so... you're hosed.
- jeroen 14y ago
  The point is that more resources are not needed. Just going back to 40 hours a week will increase total productivity.
deleted 14y ago
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dscrd 14y ago
I really don't see how anyone (assuming intellectual, creative jobs) could work more than 10 hours a week, every week -- if we count as 'work' only the time spent to produce something useful.
preinheimer 14y ago
The article is self-contradictory. It argues at length that working more than 40 hours a week reduces your output, then states: "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 math they're using there 50 hours x 4 employees = 40 hours x 5 employees is either wrong, or the rest of the article is.
- trjordan 14y ago
  I think the point there is actually about money, not productivity. If you're paying by the hour, they're both the same to the employer, but you'll get more from the 5 40hr employees. There's a bunch of simplifying that's going on there (overhead per person, etc.), but the basic message is that if companies can only afford so many people-hours, it's hurting the people they don't hire in addition to their own employees.
- rquantz 14y ago
  I think it was referring to the earlier-mentioned practice of companies firing someone and then splitting their work between two people.
- SonicSoul 14y ago
  agreed. and it seems to use some fuzzy math where working less hours makes proportional space for an extra employee to fill in those hours. in fact, the value of extra employees ranges from marginal to non existent depending on the size of team/company due to the overhead. Unless we're talking about a coffee shop where not much collaboration is needed to get projects done, just pure clocking in and out and performing isolated tasks.
- harryh 14y ago
  Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
tsahyt 14y ago
As someone who has worked 60+ hour weeks as well as 20 hour weeks for longer periods I've always felt that working longer was doing me well. If I'm working about 40 hours or more I'm more focused during work and generally more relaxed when I'm not working. But then again that's just me. Working less than 20 hours a week makes me incredibly lazy by the way.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  I'm the exact same type of person. Edit: But this doesn't mean I push what works for me onto the people I work with. It works for me, so I do it. What also works for me is when I feel like not working I leave. When you put in lots of hours, you tend to get those types of freedoms; which I enjoy greatly.
snitko 14y ago
If you have a marketable skill and there's little competition - I'm pretty sure you can negotiate whatever hours you want. If you have a competition, your options are decreased. If it happens so that your skills are not very marketable you either be prepared to put up with more constraints and worse conditions or improve your skills. What people who favor unions assume is that workers are not ever willing to improve and raise their market price, and that they are hopelessly exploited by the employer. The intentions of bringing more comfort into people's stressful lives are understandable, but by just wishing it and possibly legislating it we are not making anyone richer. The overall effect will be less jobs for low-skilled workers who do not have enough skills to compete on the job market.
henrik_w 14y ago
Great article. Discussed previously at HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101
EliRivers 14y ago
I read this title and thought it was a demand to increase the working work. Work 40 hours per week? Is that some kind of joke? Then I read the comments and was quietly horrified. I'm guessing a long long working week is a U.S. thing.
- Tycho 14y ago
  I think they include lunch hours in the 40 hour count, so it's really just a nine to five monday to friday.
  - abracadaniel 14y ago
    Nope, 8-5 M-F is standard.
  - thirdtruck 14y ago
    I have the same experience as abracadaniel above: the hour count excludes lunches.
jayferd 14y ago
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, since few people seem to know it. If you are a software engineer or IT professional working in California, and are paid less than about 81K a year or $35/hr, you are legally entitled to extra overtime pay. Definitely something to talk to a manager (or a lawyer) about. See http://www.california-labor-law-attorney.com/it-professionals.php http://www.california-labor-law-attorney.com/it-professional... .
- jotux 14y ago
  FTA: >If you work in the computer industry and do not fall into any of the exemption categories: administrative, professional, executive or the computer software exemption, you may be entitled to overtime pay. Generally non-exempt employees are entitled to overtime and exempt are not. I believe most software/IT professionals hired full time in CA are exempt employees.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    So, it didn't used to be this way (in recent history). IT industry people making less than $75k/yr used to be able to invoke this law. This was iirc in the early 2000s. FWIW, exempt/non-exempt status has everything to do with what you do and not what you were "hired as" or if you're salaried or not (salaried non-exempt is possible).
  - jayferd 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure most "Software Engineer" positions are non-exempt, unless paid above the threshold. I'm not a lawyer, though, so here's the list of exemptions in the law itself (CA Labor Code s. 515.5(b)) (b) The exemption provided in subdivision (a) does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply: (1) The employee is a trainee or employee in an entry-level position who is learning to become proficient in the theoretical and practical application of highly specialized information to computer systems analysis, programming, and software engineering. (2) The employee is in a computer-related occupation but has not attained the level of skill and expertise necessary to work independently and without close supervision. (3) The employee is engaged in the operation of computers or in the manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware and related equipment. (4) The employee is an engineer, drafter, machinist, or other professional whose work is highly dependent upon or facilitated by the use of computers and computer software programs and who is skilled in computer-aided design software, including CAD/CAM, but who is not engaged in computer systems analysis, programming, or any other similarly skilled computer-related occupation. (5) The employee is a writer engaged in writing material, including box labels, product descriptions, documentation, promotional material, setup and installation instructions, and other similar written information, either for print or for onscreen media or who writes or provides content material intended to be read by customers, subscribers, or visitors to computer-related media such as the World Wide Web or CD-ROMs. (6) The employee is engaged in any of the activities set forth in subdivision (a) for the purpose of creating imagery for effects used in the motion picture, television, or theatrical industry.
mrbgty 14y ago
In Japan, working yourself to death is common enough that they have a word for it: karoshi http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/12/AR2008071201630.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...
- cdestroyer 14y ago
  Seriously man. God bless the Japanese. Their work hours are horrible.
koof 14y ago
As a soon to be first time job hunter (beyond internships): how do I find jobs that aren't 50 hr+/wk death marches? Should I consider government? I say this because the internships I've already done I've been encouraged to work weekends.
- notjoeflynn 14y ago
  Talk to folks that work there currently (LinkedIn helps with this) and ask questions when you interview about work/life and whether or not overtime is compensated. As a developer, you have the luxury (that most workers don't these days) of being highly in demand so you can afford to be particular about this if it's a concern. Startups and the game dev industry are probably a bad choice if you're looking to avoid 40hr+ weeks. Boring SMB software product companies have been bad on this for me (anecdotal, I know) due to misaligned incentives (mainly sales selling product that didn't exist yet.) Consulting has been great on this for me, assuming the folks running the place care about lasting client relationships & quality more than maximizing billable hours.
- logn 14y ago
  In the course of a day of interviews with a company I always try to ask one person how many hours they work. Also, look for hourly jobs. That's the surest way to not overwork. Government would be good. And probably most mega corp jobs. Watch out for any job requiring on-call rotation.
deleted 14y ago
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bmuon 14y ago
I never quite believed in the 40-hour week. It kills every possibility of doing anything else other than work in your life. I prefer the 36 hour week. Work 6 days a week instead of 5, but get 2 extra hours a day to dedicate to whatever you want.
grellas 14y ago
The 40-hour week is forever gone in the startup world, and that is simply one of the trade-offs in having moved from a world where big enterprises emphasized long-term relationships with defined pension benefits and health coverage for life to a new world in which such enterprises have faltered and sunk only to be displaced by the startups that disrupted them through technical and other innovations. One can howl at the moon over these developments but is it really desirable to revert to an older day where a faithful employee's reward for long-term service was getting a gold watch on retirement or a $10K bonus for having invented the thing that made the employer hundreds of millions? On a technical legal note, U.S. overtime laws have long since institutionalized the 40-hour week for non-exempt (generally lower skilled) employees and that remains the overwhelming norm in the economy. In that sense, there is no need to "bring back" the 40-hour week. It never went away. If, as the author seems to espouse, the goal is to impose a strict weekly limit on the higher-skilled employees as well (in the case of Silicon Valley, tech professionals), it takes laws to do that and laws restrict freedom. Granted that efficiency studies might cause some employers to adopt strict hourly limits as a matter of company policy, or that individual lifestyle choices might cause a given employee to run in horror from the idea of slave-like work hours, do tech professionals really want to be prohibited from making such choices for themselves? It is one thing to say that laws are needed to protect those who cannot protect themselves. It is quite another to impose the force of law on what really is a lifestyle choice to be made by those who are equipped and smart enough to make it for themselves. Trying to "bring back" the 40-hour week from this perspective is, in my view, a very bad idea that would seriously harm the tech-driven companies that populate the startup world.
- untog 14y ago
  an older day where a faithful employee's reward for long-term service was getting a gold watch on retirement or a $10K bonus for having invented the thing that made the employer hundreds of millions You think startups are any different? Unless you are one of the very first employees in a startup that is massively successful, you're not going to benefit financially compared to a job at BigCorp. In fact, the loss of higher salary, bonuses and benefits mean that startup employees are often working longer and getting less in return. It's time to get rid of the culture where you have to stay in the office as long as the founder does- his incentives are totally different. A 40 hour week sounds great to me, but it requires a cultural change, not a legal one.
flavien_bessede 14y ago
At first, I thought this was a french post complaining about the 35-hour work week ... looks like nobody will ever agree.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  One more reason for me to enjoy living in Europe.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
The claim that working past 40 hours is unproductive is pretty weak empirically. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.h... http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr... The most current data suggests the optimum is actually 60 hours (in construction), and there is little info on knowledge work.
- IsaacL 14y ago
  Indeed, I have heard from a few friends who worked in consulting that hourly productivity held steady up to around 60 hours/week. Over 80/hours per week, it dropped off rapidly. Between those two figures was an ambiguous zone.
  - brc 14y ago
    Ambiguous because it would be different per person, and different per person over different time periods. The thought that 40 hours is the local maxima for all persons on the planet in all jobs is frankly ridiculous. There are organisational benefits for averaging this when co-ordination is needed (ie assembly line, construction site) - but this isn't as important when so-called 'knowledge workers' are able to individually work on projects and come together at set points for the vital co-ordination. Productivity discussions should be about flexibility and the ability for workers to set their own times (both total hours and start/finish times). Not about some type of 20th century union negotiating point.
imroot 14y ago
I've actually gone back to a 40 hour work week (as a consultant) after working six months doing 80+ hour work weeks (as a salaried W2, Employee). I'm happier, and healthier (I've dropped 30 pounds since moving into the role). To each their own.
dreamdu5t 14y ago
Hours don't linearly scale with accomplishment in software. Measure accomplishment, set goals, pay based on salary not hours.
stephen_g 14y ago
Interestingly enough, in Australia the standard full-time work week was 40 hours, but Fair Work Australia recently changed it so the maximum an employer can ask a full-time employee to work in a week is 38 hours. Some people at the company I work at do work quite a bit more, but this is actually discouraged by the company (it counts as time in-leiu so they can take that time off later). This seems a massive contrast to the US where articles like this make it seem like people work far longer hours to make it look like they're a harder worker. Does that really happen?
- jonathanwallace 14y ago
  Some places it does, some places it doesn't. Much depends upon the local labor market, industry, etc. "It depends."
michaelochurch 14y ago
40 hours of metered work, for a programmer, is a ridiculous and onerous expectation. Let me explain, because I'm not averse to people working hard. I work quite hard as well. By "metered work", I mean the stuff that's requested by bosses and that you're supposed to dedicate your "working time" toward with a singular focus. I include availability (pager duty) as metered work, even if some of that's "down time". Any time you are worrying about bosses or metrics or pagers or status meetings, you're at work. Metered work obligations should be closer to 20, with the other 20-30+ invested in the stuff we have to do in order to stay relevant: keeping up with new technologies, exploratory side projects, self-directed coding, open source contribution, attending conferences. All of this stuff pays off and is useful work: it just doesn't pay off in the short term or appease a typical manager. 40+ hour metered-work commitments should be reserved for very rare occasions: existential threats to the company, not high-strung middle management. This would make programming more a real profession, which is what it should be.
tetomb 14y ago
I feel that the four day work week is the sweet spot for productivity and I will institute this when I start hiring. 28-32 hours of work a week is better than 15-20 hours of work and 20 hours of facebook and lolcats.
splicer 14y ago
I enjoy working 80 hours weeks once in while, when I get stoked on creating something new. What I can't stand is daily 10:30am daily scrums when I've been up until 4am coding. If you want to kill-off your employees' passion, I recommend agile methodology.
- jonathanwallace 14y ago
  Sounds like a shitty version of agile. agile is people over processes. I'd investigate changing the process or changing jobs. Why do you have to be at the stand up?
  - splicer 14y ago
    Because my boss, my boss' boss, and his boss' boss are all micro managers. I've sacrificed too much just to walk away now. Once my code ships though, I'll likely set sail as well.
ck2 14y ago
Actually, 2013 will bring the 29-hour work week because if you work more than that, by law your employer has to pay half of your health-insurance which can be a few thousand dollars on their part. So expect two shifts of people working 20-29 hours a week. At least unemployment numbers should go down in theory but this is a heck of a loophole.
kleiba 14y ago
Why on Earth would I want to go back to the 40-hour work week? http://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment/conditions-of-employment/pages/hours-of-work.aspx http://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment/conditions-of-employme...
- joonix 14y ago
  The "reasonable additional hours" factors leave things wide open. You could easily argue any white collar job can require over 38 hours reasonably with those factors. My wife works in an office in Australia where most people work over 60/hrs a week and she's pressured to work more than 50. If some enthusiastically work over 50hrs, everyone else basically has to stick around as well or they will be evaluated poorly and lose out on advancement.
  - kleiba 14y ago
    If some enthusiastically work over 50hrs, everyone else basically has to stick around as well or they will be evaluated poorly and lose out on advancement. Do you mean in that particular company? In general, I think that's a myth.
Trapick 14y ago
No thanks, I like my 35 hour work week just fine. Maybe you suckers should try Canada?
- valugi 14y ago
  yeah. me2 I like my 37.5 hours/week in Norway.
kayoone 14y ago
As long as you have startup founders glorifying their >100h average work weeks this is not going to happen.
mikhailfranco 14y ago
I guess this headline would have different implication in France.
fholm 14y ago
Again I love my country (Sweden). There are multiple laws in place that forbid companies to force people to work more then X hours per week/month/year. There's several different averages across days, weeks and months that control how much "overtime" you're allowed to work. The max is 200 hours per year though. It obviously varies, and not everyone follows these laws, especially in (game) development, etc. As long as you the employee agrees to working over time (often uncompensated) none is going to bat an eye. The important thing is that you have a law that will back you up incase your company is trying to force you.
lucian2k 14y ago
How about this? "Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead" Do you guys know if this is somewhere documented ...? It would be interesting ...
cdestroyer 14y ago
"Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest." That's me now.

304 points by pnathan 14y ago

We could do quite a bit better than that. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Forget about "any-number-hour week" - each one has his own work regime and in startups especially you work not for counting hours, I guess.

scott_meade 14y ago
The point of the article is that you should be counting hours. Even if the hours themselves are not your goal or measure, there are still physiological reasons that too many hours are non-optimal. Even and in some respects, especially for, knowledge workers. Too few hours and not much gets done. Too many hours and you're wasting money and effort while harming quality.

wombleton 14y ago

I honestly thought it would be arguing to go up to 40 hours.

prostoalex 14y ago
That kind of article would feature a *.fr TLD.

rdl 14y ago

Reducing commute and other wasted time is probably still the low hanging fruit for most people. If your work is sufficiently varied, I don't see how 60-80h/wk is unsustainable at at least 1.5x the work you'd accomplish in 40h, if (and only if) the other hassles of life are taken care of for you -- no cleaning, commute time, etc. I don't think I could do a single task for 80h/wk productively, but I could certainly do my primary job for 40-60h/wk productively and then spend 20h/wk doing meetings with users, conferences, etc.

otakucode 14y ago
But should you? Your employer will not reward you for it with anything that could be considered reasonable when compared to the value you are creating for them. What people can do, and what employers are willing to pay for, are two very different things. Employers, by and large, have adopted a strategy of paying employees as little as possible, divorcing their compensation from the value of their work. Capitalism says that employers should receive as little work of as little value as possible in return.
- NoPiece 14y ago
  If everyone had your attitude, then employers would be justified in paying as little as possible. Thankfully my experience has been that most co-workers don't try to provide as little value as possible, and most employers actively try to reward value (with varying success at evaluating it).
- liber8 14y ago
  I'm not sure where your definition of Capitalism is coming from, but nothing about capitalism or free markets requires (or even predicts) that workers will be paid commensurate to the value they create. Workers are paid based on supply and demand. If moving a pile of manure from one side of a parking lot to the other will net me $100,000,000, that doesn't mean the laborer I hire to move the manure will share in the value created by moving the manure. This is because the pool of laborers willing and able to do the job is roughly 4 billion people (or more accurately, tens of thousands of people in the immediate vicinity). Competition ensures that a laborer will be willing to move the manure for (roughly $15/hour here in Southern California), regardless of the ultimate value the work produces for me. On the other hand, if a Steve Jobsian/Jony Ive figure creates a series of industry dominating products from whole cloth, he may get to share in a huge percentage of the value created by those products, simply because there are only a handful of people on the planet capable of creating those products, and thus the employer is willing to pay his $100,000,000 salary.
  - king_jester 14y ago

otakucode 14y ago

40 hours? No. Average worker productivity has skyrocketed since 1980 with the introduction of computers and automation technology. Salaries have remained flat. A 20 hour work week with the same salary would be far more reasonable (though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce).

mylons 14y ago
this, 1000x this.
crusso 14y ago
though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce Employees aren't really compensated for increases in output that are achieved through standard business practices, technology, automation, etc. That's because their relative input remains the same. Same input, same salaries. If I'm starting a business mass-producing widgets and I fund the machinery, process development, and software to produce that -- why should I pay extra for the employee who really only has to push the big red button to start the machines going every morning? Just because a lot of value is produced when he pushes that red button doesn't mean that he should be highly compensated.
- dsr_ 14y ago
  You shouldn't. You should push that button yourself in the morning, and save the salary entirely. Consequences are left as an exercise for the student.
- morsch 14y ago
  In that case, you will be forced to drop prices, because your competitor's are probably doing the same (otherwise you'll run out of employees rsn). If prices are falling across the board, people don't need to earn wages as high as before since they can reproduce themselves at the same level with less income. I'm not sure there's any value to this kind of armchair economics.
  - 14y ago

drewblaisdell 14y ago

Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part-time job or downsizing your position at a company? Every listing for part-time I see seems to be for someone with a lesser skillset.

theabraham 14y ago
Seems like a good time to build a hefty savings and begin investing. I think if you were to go part-time, you'd lose some of your benefits. And if your employer is used to you working 40-hours, you might end up working more than 20-hours due to a higher workload. Depends on your situation, and it can't hurt to bring it up. Maybe try winding down your hours progressively.
- philsnow 14y ago
  I think he _does_ want to invest, but in experiences during his early 20s, rather than by building his finances.
  - nathan_f77 14y ago
    I think many of the HN crowd has a slightly different mindset, since a lot of us are entrepreneurs. I'm in my early 20s, and am about to start working 40+ hour weeks for an early-stage startup. To me, this work _is_ a great experience. There's also the very small chance that we'll make it big and I'll be able to 'retire' and focus on my other passions. Even if we crash and burn, I won't consider that time wasted. The lessons learned will be invaluable, but I also hope to save enough to travel the world for a while, no matter what happens. 20 hour work weeks don't usually lead to more life experiences, in my experience. You just have more time to focus on side-projects or hobbies. You'll still be 'working' 40+ hour weeks, but dividing your time between different projects. As someone commented before, if he wanted experiences, then he should take a few months of unpaid leave of absence, and go exploring the world.

jonsen 14y ago

I once saw a tv documentary about the CEO of a big danish company. She worked 40 hours per week, and to that she commented: "If I couldn't get done what is expected of me in the allotted time frame, I wouldn't have the competence required for my position."

jeffool 14y ago
I once saw a janitor who always had more work to do. She worked 40 hours a week and then did the extra that the boss asked her about on any given day. She could've told him that cleaning desks wasn't in the contract. Or she could've reported the overtime. But not everyone has those kinds of luxuries if they want to keep their jobs. Some jobs always have more shit to shovel, be it actual shit or feature creep. And some people will always expect you to shovel more next quarter/year.
- stephen_g 14y ago
  I think the point is that people should have the luxury to only work 40 hours, and/or properly report overtime and keep their jobs. Over here if an employer forced one employee to work more than 38 hours a single week, they could be fined up to $6,600. Firing a worker for not working more than that would be unfair dismissal and attract more fines, prosecution etc... There are provisions for reasonable overtime, but cleaning desks wouldn't fall into that unless it was some kind of emergency... And the employee can work overtime if they want (and are paid for it or get time-in-leiu) but they can't be expected to.
  - joonix 14y ago
    They can get this luxury, if they unionize. But Americans won't tolerate any such thing, nor will they strive for it. The culture in America is all about slaving away as much as you can, either out of fear of losing your job or desire to be promoted up the ranks (with the reward of even more work). They make very few demands of their employers because they are told by our society that they should just be happy they have a job. The best ways to gain leverage over employers that I can think of, short of unionizing or passing broad regulation: free basic healthcare coverage provided by the government to all, and a strong economy. An ability to leave your job without fear that if you get sick you will die/bankrupt will do wonders. An ability to leave your job because the demand for labor outstrips supply will make employers compete by offering better perks, compensation, benefits, work environments, etc (already the case in high tech).

enraged_camel 14y ago

I think we need to stop counting hours worked and start measuring results instead.

jonsen 14y ago
Sure, it's just that in many cases reliable, fair, and accurate result meters are not invented yet.
brixon 14y ago
More than half the population would take a serious pay cut. In reality, I think they would if you could measure results easily without gaming.
latortuga 14y ago
There's this almost cult-like obsession with measurement among the hacker crowd where everything must be measured and optimized. Unfortunately, people don't work this way. Telling people that they haven't measured up to some arbitrary standard is a significant demotivator. If you are measuring your workers on some chart, they'll begin either gaming the chart or comparing against each other, neither of which will motivate them to do better work - it will motivate them to optimize whatever you're measuring. I saw this at my last job and it was blindingly, painfully obvious how bad of an idea it was but management kept it up. Take a support staff for example. What do you measure? How many calls they make? That incentivizes making lots of short calls. How many notes about clients calls they made? That incentivizes leaving lots of minimum length notes. Am I a worse support staff member if I leave longer notes and make longer calls? How do you accurately measure the "results" of a support staff? By customer retention? Good luck correlating individual client retention to specific support staff when customers talk to many different employees during a sales or support process. Once you get past people who create objective value for the company, measurements are difficult to impossible. Measuring against an arbitrary standard is worse than doing nothing because it demotivates employees who aren't as high up on your arbitrary standard. Not everyone at a company has a direct impact on revenue - janitor, accountant, sysadmin, chef, etc.
- rowsdower 14y ago

bitops 14y ago

Wanting to work fewer hours is something I think we all hope for, but it also depends on what we're after in life. I was reminded of this essay from Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

deleted 14y ago
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Joeri 14y ago
I disagree with this sentence from that article: "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour.". You cannot work double the hours and be more productive. If you work 80 hours on a continual basis, you will get less done than if you worked 40 hours. I have seen smart people reduced to blubbering idiots by the hours they put in through misguided passion. The true productivity benefit from going into business for yourself is not that you can put in more effort. The human capacity for productive work is not that flexible, because we are not machines. The real multiplier is that you can direct your effort at that which truly matters. Most businesses spend 10% of their budget on 90% of their value. If you can work smarter you can get dramatically more done because you are building that which truly matters. That is where the PG article is right. But, here's the problem with what I'm saying: people working crazy hours succeed. Everyone can see that. How can that be explained? In my opinion, those people succeed despite those hours, not because of them. It is their laser-like focus on reaching a goal that makes them succeed, but it is also this focus which makes them put in more hours thinking it brings success home sooner. It don't think it does, but it's almost impossible to prove it doesn't because there just aren't many places where highly passionate and focused people stick religiously to a 40 hour work schedule.
- crusso 14y ago
  You cannot work double the hours and be more productive You can't simply put typical workers on a schedule that's twice as long and expect more productivity, that's true. Individually, though, you can normally become extraordinarily more productive if you have the right motivation. people working crazy hours succeed. Why is this such a mystery? Haven't you ever thrown yourselves into a new startup or idea and spent every waking hour on it for long periods of time because you were excited by what you were doing and it didn't feel like you were working? Haven't you ever gone to sleep thinking about your ideas, and jumped out of bed right away the next morning like a kid on Christmas and then worked on those ideas, barely wanting to take time to eat, at last breaking away from what you're working on late at night because you know you need to get some sleep? Maybe it's a gene that allows some people to go into that mode. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right motivation. Regardless, it appears that people who don't experience it can't understand it any more than blind people can really appreciate colors.

pnathan 14y ago

I've been on death march projects before; these projects simply burnt people out and quality was atrocious. There's a point where you don't care much about the job, all you want to do is go home and perform $favorite_mindless_relaxation. It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life. I get concerned when I see people celebrate things like weekly hackathons running into the early morning hours, working 60+ hour weeks, etc. Of course it can be needful, but it's also not a sustainable work pace doable for 30-40 years without massive personal issues for the vast majority of people.

masklinn 14y ago
> It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life. And your mental hygiene, there's no way you're going to think about (let alone implement) that idea of yours when you're mentally exhausted.

killface 14y ago

This is why any competent computer worker should never accept a salaried position. Sure, it's cool to say "I make 100k/yr!", but it's much cooler to say "I make 65/hr, but I got paid for that 4-hour conference call last night to troubleshoot production"

jabbernotty 14y ago
Obviously, one's mileage may vary. As a developer in the country I live in, the only positions are salaried positions.
- marvin 14y ago
  In countries with good overtime laws, you get overtime even in salaried positions. Where I live, there are _very_ strict laws about what constitutes overtime, and the limit is at 40 hours per week. For any work beyond that, you must get paid by the hour and get at least a 40% bonus above what you would normally make. If you do not get this, you can sue your employer and will win. It is possible to get exceptions to this law, but no exceptions are possible on an individual basis - they must be negotiated across whole groups of employees by a labor organization. Such agreements allow certain groups of workers to 80 and 90-hour weeks, but the conditions and payment are very strictly negotiated. Another exception is for owners and founders. Consequently, overtime is only used where strictly necessary. I think this is an excellent system to protect the rights of laborers.

allsystemsgo 14y ago

This may work among programmers, software developers, etc. But in other more structured environments [management consulting, public accounting, I-banking, etc] a 40 hour work week will almost never be the norm. Sure, more resources could be added to the project, but the budget doesn't support that, so... you're hosed.

jeroen 14y ago
The point is that more resources are not needed. Just going back to 40 hours a week will increase total productivity.

deleted 14y ago

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dscrd 14y ago

I really don't see how anyone (assuming intellectual, creative jobs) could work more than 10 hours a week, every week -- if we count as 'work' only the time spent to produce something useful.

preinheimer 14y ago

The article is self-contradictory. It argues at length that working more than 40 hours a week reduces your output, then states: "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 math they're using there 50 hours x 4 employees = 40 hours x 5 employees is either wrong, or the rest of the article is.

trjordan 14y ago
I think the point there is actually about money, not productivity. If you're paying by the hour, they're both the same to the employer, but you'll get more from the 5 40hr employees. There's a bunch of simplifying that's going on there (overhead per person, etc.), but the basic message is that if companies can only afford so many people-hours, it's hurting the people they don't hire in addition to their own employees.
rquantz 14y ago
I think it was referring to the earlier-mentioned practice of companies firing someone and then splitting their work between two people.
SonicSoul 14y ago
agreed. and it seems to use some fuzzy math where working less hours makes proportional space for an extra employee to fill in those hours. in fact, the value of extra employees ranges from marginal to non existent depending on the size of team/company due to the overhead. Unless we're talking about a coffee shop where not much collaboration is needed to get projects done, just pure clocking in and out and performing isolated tasks.
harryh 14y ago
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

tsahyt 14y ago

As someone who has worked 60+ hour weeks as well as 20 hour weeks for longer periods I've always felt that working longer was doing me well. If I'm working about 40 hours or more I'm more focused during work and generally more relaxed when I'm not working. But then again that's just me. Working less than 20 hours a week makes me incredibly lazy by the way.

3pt14159 14y ago
I'm the exact same type of person. Edit: But this doesn't mean I push what works for me onto the people I work with. It works for me, so I do it. What also works for me is when I feel like not working I leave. When you put in lots of hours, you tend to get those types of freedoms; which I enjoy greatly.

snitko 14y ago

If you have a marketable skill and there's little competition - I'm pretty sure you can negotiate whatever hours you want. If you have a competition, your options are decreased. If it happens so that your skills are not very marketable you either be prepared to put up with more constraints and worse conditions or improve your skills. What people who favor unions assume is that workers are not ever willing to improve and raise their market price, and that they are hopelessly exploited by the employer. The intentions of bringing more comfort into people's stressful lives are understandable, but by just wishing it and possibly legislating it we are not making anyone richer. The overall effect will be less jobs for low-skilled workers who do not have enough skills to compete on the job market.

henrik_w 14y ago

Great article. Discussed previously at HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101

EliRivers 14y ago

I read this title and thought it was a demand to increase the working work. Work 40 hours per week? Is that some kind of joke? Then I read the comments and was quietly horrified. I'm guessing a long long working week is a U.S. thing.

Tycho 14y ago
I think they include lunch hours in the 40 hour count, so it's really just a nine to five monday to friday.
- abracadaniel 14y ago
  Nope, 8-5 M-F is standard.
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  I have the same experience as abracadaniel above: the hour count excludes lunches.

jayferd 14y ago

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, since few people seem to know it. If you are a software engineer or IT professional working in California, and are paid less than about 81K a year or $35/hr, you are legally entitled to extra overtime pay. Definitely something to talk to a manager (or a lawyer) about. See http://www.california-labor-law-attorney.com/it-professionals.php http://www.california-labor-law-attorney.com/it-professional... .

jotux 14y ago
FTA: >If you work in the computer industry and do not fall into any of the exemption categories: administrative, professional, executive or the computer software exemption, you may be entitled to overtime pay. Generally non-exempt employees are entitled to overtime and exempt are not. I believe most software/IT professionals hired full time in CA are exempt employees.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  So, it didn't used to be this way (in recent history). IT industry people making less than $75k/yr used to be able to invoke this law. This was iirc in the early 2000s. FWIW, exempt/non-exempt status has everything to do with what you do and not what you were "hired as" or if you're salaried or not (salaried non-exempt is possible).
- jayferd 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure most "Software Engineer" positions are non-exempt, unless paid above the threshold. I'm not a lawyer, though, so here's the list of exemptions in the law itself (CA Labor Code s. 515.5(b)) (b) The exemption provided in subdivision (a) does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply: (1) The employee is a trainee or employee in an entry-level position who is learning to become proficient in the theoretical and practical application of highly specialized information to computer systems analysis, programming, and software engineering. (2) The employee is in a computer-related occupation but has not attained the level of skill and expertise necessary to work independently and without close supervision. (3) The employee is engaged in the operation of computers or in the manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware and related equipment. (4) The employee is an engineer, drafter, machinist, or other professional whose work is highly dependent upon or facilitated by the use of computers and computer software programs and who is skilled in computer-aided design software, including CAD/CAM, but who is not engaged in computer systems analysis, programming, or any other similarly skilled computer-related occupation. (5) The employee is a writer engaged in writing material, including box labels, product descriptions, documentation, promotional material, setup and installation instructions, and other similar written information, either for print or for onscreen media or who writes or provides content material intended to be read by customers, subscribers, or visitors to computer-related media such as the World Wide Web or CD-ROMs. (6) The employee is engaged in any of the activities set forth in subdivision (a) for the purpose of creating imagery for effects used in the motion picture, television, or theatrical industry.

mrbgty 14y ago

In Japan, working yourself to death is common enough that they have a word for it: karoshi http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/12/AR2008071201630.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...

cdestroyer 14y ago
Seriously man. God bless the Japanese. Their work hours are horrible.

koof 14y ago

As a soon to be first time job hunter (beyond internships): how do I find jobs that aren't 50 hr+/wk death marches? Should I consider government? I say this because the internships I've already done I've been encouraged to work weekends.

notjoeflynn 14y ago
Talk to folks that work there currently (LinkedIn helps with this) and ask questions when you interview about work/life and whether or not overtime is compensated. As a developer, you have the luxury (that most workers don't these days) of being highly in demand so you can afford to be particular about this if it's a concern. Startups and the game dev industry are probably a bad choice if you're looking to avoid 40hr+ weeks. Boring SMB software product companies have been bad on this for me (anecdotal, I know) due to misaligned incentives (mainly sales selling product that didn't exist yet.) Consulting has been great on this for me, assuming the folks running the place care about lasting client relationships & quality more than maximizing billable hours.
logn 14y ago
In the course of a day of interviews with a company I always try to ask one person how many hours they work. Also, look for hourly jobs. That's the surest way to not overwork. Government would be good. And probably most mega corp jobs. Watch out for any job requiring on-call rotation.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bmuon 14y ago

I never quite believed in the 40-hour week. It kills every possibility of doing anything else other than work in your life. I prefer the 36 hour week. Work 6 days a week instead of 5, but get 2 extra hours a day to dedicate to whatever you want.

grellas 14y ago

The 40-hour week is forever gone in the startup world, and that is simply one of the trade-offs in having moved from a world where big enterprises emphasized long-term relationships with defined pension benefits and health coverage for life to a new world in which such enterprises have faltered and sunk only to be displaced by the startups that disrupted them through technical and other innovations. One can howl at the moon over these developments but is it really desirable to revert to an older day where a faithful employee's reward for long-term service was getting a gold watch on retirement or a $10K bonus for having invented the thing that made the employer hundreds of millions? On a technical legal note, U.S. overtime laws have long since institutionalized the 40-hour week for non-exempt (generally lower skilled) employees and that remains the overwhelming norm in the economy. In that sense, there is no need to "bring back" the 40-hour week. It never went away. If, as the author seems to espouse, the goal is to impose a strict weekly limit on the higher-skilled employees as well (in the case of Silicon Valley, tech professionals), it takes laws to do that and laws restrict freedom. Granted that efficiency studies might cause some employers to adopt strict hourly limits as a matter of company policy, or that individual lifestyle choices might cause a given employee to run in horror from the idea of slave-like work hours, do tech professionals really want to be prohibited from making such choices for themselves? It is one thing to say that laws are needed to protect those who cannot protect themselves. It is quite another to impose the force of law on what really is a lifestyle choice to be made by those who are equipped and smart enough to make it for themselves. Trying to "bring back" the 40-hour week from this perspective is, in my view, a very bad idea that would seriously harm the tech-driven companies that populate the startup world.

untog 14y ago
an older day where a faithful employee's reward for long-term service was getting a gold watch on retirement or a $10K bonus for having invented the thing that made the employer hundreds of millions You think startups are any different? Unless you are one of the very first employees in a startup that is massively successful, you're not going to benefit financially compared to a job at BigCorp. In fact, the loss of higher salary, bonuses and benefits mean that startup employees are often working longer and getting less in return. It's time to get rid of the culture where you have to stay in the office as long as the founder does- his incentives are totally different. A 40 hour week sounds great to me, but it requires a cultural change, not a legal one.

flavien_bessede 14y ago

At first, I thought this was a french post complaining about the 35-hour work week ... looks like nobody will ever agree.

pjmlp 14y ago
One more reason for me to enjoy living in Europe.

yummyfajitas 14y ago

The claim that working past 40 hours is unproductive is pretty weak empirically. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.h... http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr... The most current data suggests the optimum is actually 60 hours (in construction), and there is little info on knowledge work.

IsaacL 14y ago
Indeed, I have heard from a few friends who worked in consulting that hourly productivity held steady up to around 60 hours/week. Over 80/hours per week, it dropped off rapidly. Between those two figures was an ambiguous zone.
- brc 14y ago
  Ambiguous because it would be different per person, and different per person over different time periods. The thought that 40 hours is the local maxima for all persons on the planet in all jobs is frankly ridiculous. There are organisational benefits for averaging this when co-ordination is needed (ie assembly line, construction site) - but this isn't as important when so-called 'knowledge workers' are able to individually work on projects and come together at set points for the vital co-ordination. Productivity discussions should be about flexibility and the ability for workers to set their own times (both total hours and start/finish times). Not about some type of 20th century union negotiating point.

imroot 14y ago

I've actually gone back to a 40 hour work week (as a consultant) after working six months doing 80+ hour work weeks (as a salaried W2, Employee). I'm happier, and healthier (I've dropped 30 pounds since moving into the role). To each their own.

dreamdu5t 14y ago

Hours don't linearly scale with accomplishment in software. Measure accomplishment, set goals, pay based on salary not hours.

stephen_g 14y ago

Interestingly enough, in Australia the standard full-time work week was 40 hours, but Fair Work Australia recently changed it so the maximum an employer can ask a full-time employee to work in a week is 38 hours. Some people at the company I work at do work quite a bit more, but this is actually discouraged by the company (it counts as time in-leiu so they can take that time off later). This seems a massive contrast to the US where articles like this make it seem like people work far longer hours to make it look like they're a harder worker. Does that really happen?

jonathanwallace 14y ago
Some places it does, some places it doesn't. Much depends upon the local labor market, industry, etc. "It depends."

michaelochurch 14y ago

40 hours of metered work, for a programmer, is a ridiculous and onerous expectation. Let me explain, because I'm not averse to people working hard. I work quite hard as well. By "metered work", I mean the stuff that's requested by bosses and that you're supposed to dedicate your "working time" toward with a singular focus. I include availability (pager duty) as metered work, even if some of that's "down time". Any time you are worrying about bosses or metrics or pagers or status meetings, you're at work. Metered work obligations should be closer to 20, with the other 20-30+ invested in the stuff we have to do in order to stay relevant: keeping up with new technologies, exploratory side projects, self-directed coding, open source contribution, attending conferences. All of this stuff pays off and is useful work: it just doesn't pay off in the short term or appease a typical manager. 40+ hour metered-work commitments should be reserved for very rare occasions: existential threats to the company, not high-strung middle management. This would make programming more a real profession, which is what it should be.

tetomb 14y ago

I feel that the four day work week is the sweet spot for productivity and I will institute this when I start hiring. 28-32 hours of work a week is better than 15-20 hours of work and 20 hours of facebook and lolcats.

splicer 14y ago

I enjoy working 80 hours weeks once in while, when I get stoked on creating something new. What I can't stand is daily 10:30am daily scrums when I've been up until 4am coding. If you want to kill-off your employees' passion, I recommend agile methodology.

jonathanwallace 14y ago
Sounds like a shitty version of agile. agile is people over processes. I'd investigate changing the process or changing jobs. Why do you have to be at the stand up?
- splicer 14y ago
  Because my boss, my boss' boss, and his boss' boss are all micro managers. I've sacrificed too much just to walk away now. Once my code ships though, I'll likely set sail as well.

ck2 14y ago

Actually, 2013 will bring the 29-hour work week because if you work more than that, by law your employer has to pay half of your health-insurance which can be a few thousand dollars on their part. So expect two shifts of people working 20-29 hours a week. At least unemployment numbers should go down in theory but this is a heck of a loophole.

kleiba 14y ago

Why on Earth would I want to go back to the 40-hour work week? http://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment/conditions-of-employment/pages/hours-of-work.aspx http://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment/conditions-of-employme...

joonix 14y ago
The "reasonable additional hours" factors leave things wide open. You could easily argue any white collar job can require over 38 hours reasonably with those factors. My wife works in an office in Australia where most people work over 60/hrs a week and she's pressured to work more than 50. If some enthusiastically work over 50hrs, everyone else basically has to stick around as well or they will be evaluated poorly and lose out on advancement.
- kleiba 14y ago
  If some enthusiastically work over 50hrs, everyone else basically has to stick around as well or they will be evaluated poorly and lose out on advancement. Do you mean in that particular company? In general, I think that's a myth.

Trapick 14y ago

No thanks, I like my 35 hour work week just fine. Maybe you suckers should try Canada?

valugi 14y ago
yeah. me2 I like my 37.5 hours/week in Norway.

kayoone 14y ago

As long as you have startup founders glorifying their >100h average work weeks this is not going to happen.

mikhailfranco 14y ago

I guess this headline would have different implication in France.

fholm 14y ago

Again I love my country (Sweden). There are multiple laws in place that forbid companies to force people to work more then X hours per week/month/year. There's several different averages across days, weeks and months that control how much "overtime" you're allowed to work. The max is 200 hours per year though. It obviously varies, and not everyone follows these laws, especially in (game) development, etc. As long as you the employee agrees to working over time (often uncompensated) none is going to bat an eye. The important thing is that you have a law that will back you up incase your company is trying to force you.

lucian2k 14y ago

How about this? "Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead" Do you guys know if this is somewhere documented ...? It would be interesting ...

cdestroyer 14y ago

"Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest." That's me now.