12 ms·

Working hours: Get a life

98 points by deusclovis 13y ago

thejteam 13y ago
One takeaway from the article is the importance of proper scaling on your graphs. The chart does not convey the real difference between the countries in any meaningful way except pointing out that Korea is an outlier. It should be scaled between 1000 and 2000 (with the caveat that Korea is off the scale) to convey the real difference between the countries. Otherwise it doesn't look at a glance like we work a whole lot more in America.
henrik_w 13y ago
Related: Bring back the 40-hour work week. 150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
- capisce 13y ago
  Let's not stop there: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week. "
    - cafard 13y ago
      Cool. How much does the average worker need to spend on health care to achieve the life expectancy of 1950? And how much to watch TVs of 1950s quality, play computer games equivalent to the pinball machines of 1950, etc.? I am not endorsing our lust for consumption here, but "standard of living" needs some definition.
      - Shivetya 13y ago
        The issue he skips is that most people won't accept a 1950s lifestyle. Far too many people live beyond their retirement means, if not just their week to week means. Image is everything to many people, the appearance of having wealth has become more important than a comfortable retirement, let alone a sustainable lifestyle. The number of people I work with in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s, with no real retirement planned is frightening.
        ahoyhere 13y ago
        That's not relevant to the fact that actual wages have gone down.
        yummyfajitas 13y ago
        It's very relevant to the question of whether real wages actually did go down. If people live better than they did in 1950, and they do it on 2013 wages, then real wages did not actually go down. There must instead be some mistake in the way real wages are calculated. (Hint: there are many, mostly in the computation of CPI.)
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        Notionally, this is already accounted for in the CPI, which, where the exact same product is no longer available, uses a similar currently available product and applies a "hedonic quality adjustment" to account for the qualitative changes. http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaqanda.htm http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaqanda.htm
  - pstack 13y ago
    If working fewer hours is better and increasing minimum wage is better, I don't see why we take stupid baby-steps? Why don't we just have a five hour work-week with a minimum of $500/hr?
- arjunnarayan 13y ago
  Not so fast: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/low-status-workers-are-not-more-exploited.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/low-status-workers-are...
- EliRivers 13y ago
  40 hours? I'm guessing that's a US thing. I'd have to be really, really desperate before I did that many hours a week.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    The 8-hour workweek is pretty standard everywhere, where are you?
    - robotresearcher 13y ago
      (assuming you mean "workday") 9 to 5 with an hour off for lunch is 7 hours of work, or 35 hour workweek. This is pretty common in mainland Europe. The UK standard is probably 9 to 5.30, for a 37.5 hour week.
    - mjolk 13y ago
      In Made-up City, Smuglandia, obviously.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      The 8-hour workweek is pretty standard everywhere 8 hour workweek! And here's me accepting 37.5 like a sucker!
  - pstack 13y ago
    Yeah, it's one of those "evil US exceptionalism" things, where Americans work a heck of a lot. If you're working less than 40hrs/wk, you're working part-time. In most professional/knowledge type industries (tech of all kinds, at the least) 40hrs is a day-dream that people would love to work, rather than the 50-100 they actually work. Of course, this is presuming you hate work. I spend more than a third of my life doing it and it's something I really enjoy. A man is defined by his hard/smart work. The typical work-day in the US starts at 8am and ends at 5pm. Throw in at least an hour or two for commute in the morning and an hour or two for commute in the evening. Possibly throw in some work-from-home after you kick off your shoes and walk through the door at home, too.
nhangen 13y ago
Working 40 hours per week would kill me. For me, work IS learning, and writing code is no different than a paintbrush on canvas. The only thing that will turn my brain off is some sort of lean back entertainment, such as TV or video games. Otherwise, why read about how to do something when I can practice it? It's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing.
- beaumartinez 13y ago
  > Work IS learning [...] it's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing. Come on. There's a big difference between being able to decide what to learn and at what pace, and being told by someone else to learn something as soon as possible so as to get work done.
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    Agreed. Anyone that doesn't believe that either is doing his own gig, has financial independence, or is drinking the Kool-Aid.
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  Exactly. When people shout it online "Get a life", they really don't understand for some people the work we do might really be fun, as horse riding, gambling, or drinking and dancing in pubs is for them.
  - polskibus 13y ago
    Just beware blurring the line - it's sometimes first step towards burnout. I wanted to give a reference, here's an article from forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/04/01/10-signs-youre-burning-out-and-what-to-do-about-it/2/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/04/01/10-signs-yo... There are studies that show that work preoccupation outside working ours can be a sign of burnout (incoming or undergoing). I know it's great to love your job, that's what flow state is all about, but there can be a darker side to it as well.
alter_ego 13y ago
I would love to see a mandatory scheme whereby employees are free to work more than forty hours per week should they wish to do so, or are required to do so, but overtime payments are guaranteed, on an increasing scale, so by the time the employer has their staff working 100 hours per week they have had to pay more than say 6 weeks salary, possibly 8. This would quickly shake out the bulk of big corps who simply encourage presenteeism and other negative cultures.
- nhangen 13y ago
  As an employer in the tech industry, I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much, and I don't own a Fortune 500 company.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    And hence the need for labor laws to rein in employers. EDIT: If you don't like the rules, go open a company in another country. The ability to employ people is a privilege, governed by labor laws. You don't make the rules, you simply have to play by them.
    - nhangen 13y ago
      You act as if employment is a right. It's not. As I always say, if you don't like the rules, build your own company. Edit: 'The ability to employ people is a privilege.' I don't believe that, but as an exercise, remove that 'privilege' and tell me how many people would be able to survive long enough to have a hobby?
      - mhurron 13y ago
        >You act as if employment is a right No, he acts like companies can not be expected to even work in their own best interests. And he's right.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        As a business owner, you would employ workers at the lowest wage possible for as many hours as possible. This is why labor laws exist.
jessepollak 13y ago
I'd be really interested to know what kind of work this analysis is done on. Is it manual labor? Or repetitive data entry? Or writing code? I'd be interested to see a breakdown between these different categories. On this note, does anyone know the original paper where those graphs came from? I clicked through to the linked paper at the end, but no such graphs appeared.
jmduke 13y ago
A big distinction for me is "programming as work" and "programming as play". I can spend eight hours at work and be absolutely drained when I get home, but still leap at the chance to say, take a bite out of my functional programming course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun -- it's awesome, and taught by the guy who designed Scala, so he knows a thing or two) because its a completely different context for me, or scroll idly through GitHub issues as I eat dinner.
- redblacktree 13y ago
  Taking that class now. As a professional developer, it pains me to say: That class is fucking hard. I haven't managed a perfect score on an assignment yet, though I'm still working on Week 2. Good luck to you! It should be a great adventure regardless.
umsm 13y ago
After working in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, you need to have a good work/life balance. When I get home, I stay away from computers. I even contemplated not having a PC at home.
- 4hthth4 13y ago
  I got rid of my TV, but not my computer.
diminoten 13y ago
Why must I stop working because other people don't like their jobs? The title tells me to "get a life", but maybe I like working 50 hours a week. I'm getting incredibly sick of people defensively justifying their own perceived laziness and then trying to tell me to work less. No, I fucking like my job, work is play for me.
pstack 13y ago
As someone who loves his job and loves to work, these articles always strike me as "I'm lazy and want to whine about it, because I would rather be sitting by the side of a pool somewhere, doing nothing". I'm sure it is a justifiable complaint if your job sucks and you hate everything about it, but the solution is to do what you can to find a better match between what you enjoy and what you do for a living rather than somehow demonizing "too much work". What almost everyone does who is posting here is not digging ditches or flipping burgers for 40hrs per week and we need to quit acting like it is.

98 points by deusclovis 13y ago

One takeaway from the article is the importance of proper scaling on your graphs. The chart does not convey the real difference between the countries in any meaningful way except pointing out that Korea is an outlier. It should be scaled between 1000 and 2000 (with the caveat that Korea is off the scale) to convey the real difference between the countries. Otherwise it doesn't look at a glance like we work a whole lot more in America.

henrik_w 13y ago

Related: Bring back the 40-hour work week. 150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

capisce 13y ago
Let's not stop there: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week. "
  - cafard 13y ago
    Cool. How much does the average worker need to spend on health care to achieve the life expectancy of 1950? And how much to watch TVs of 1950s quality, play computer games equivalent to the pinball machines of 1950, etc.? I am not endorsing our lust for consumption here, but "standard of living" needs some definition.
    - Shivetya 13y ago
      The issue he skips is that most people won't accept a 1950s lifestyle. Far too many people live beyond their retirement means, if not just their week to week means. Image is everything to many people, the appearance of having wealth has become more important than a comfortable retirement, let alone a sustainable lifestyle. The number of people I work with in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s, with no real retirement planned is frightening.
      - ahoyhere 13y ago
        That's not relevant to the fact that actual wages have gone down.
        yummyfajitas 13y ago
        It's very relevant to the question of whether real wages actually did go down. If people live better than they did in 1950, and they do it on 2013 wages, then real wages did not actually go down. There must instead be some mistake in the way real wages are calculated. (Hint: there are many, mostly in the computation of CPI.)
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      Notionally, this is already accounted for in the CPI, which, where the exact same product is no longer available, uses a similar currently available product and applies a "hedonic quality adjustment" to account for the qualitative changes. http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaqanda.htm http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaqanda.htm
- pstack 13y ago
  If working fewer hours is better and increasing minimum wage is better, I don't see why we take stupid baby-steps? Why don't we just have a five hour work-week with a minimum of $500/hr?
arjunnarayan 13y ago
Not so fast: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/low-status-workers-are-not-more-exploited.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/low-status-workers-are...
EliRivers 13y ago
40 hours? I'm guessing that's a US thing. I'd have to be really, really desperate before I did that many hours a week.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  The 8-hour workweek is pretty standard everywhere, where are you?
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    (assuming you mean "workday") 9 to 5 with an hour off for lunch is 7 hours of work, or 35 hour workweek. This is pretty common in mainland Europe. The UK standard is probably 9 to 5.30, for a 37.5 hour week.
  - mjolk 13y ago
    In Made-up City, Smuglandia, obviously.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    The 8-hour workweek is pretty standard everywhere 8 hour workweek! And here's me accepting 37.5 like a sucker!
- pstack 13y ago
  Yeah, it's one of those "evil US exceptionalism" things, where Americans work a heck of a lot. If you're working less than 40hrs/wk, you're working part-time. In most professional/knowledge type industries (tech of all kinds, at the least) 40hrs is a day-dream that people would love to work, rather than the 50-100 they actually work. Of course, this is presuming you hate work. I spend more than a third of my life doing it and it's something I really enjoy. A man is defined by his hard/smart work. The typical work-day in the US starts at 8am and ends at 5pm. Throw in at least an hour or two for commute in the morning and an hour or two for commute in the evening. Possibly throw in some work-from-home after you kick off your shoes and walk through the door at home, too.

nhangen 13y ago

Working 40 hours per week would kill me. For me, work IS learning, and writing code is no different than a paintbrush on canvas. The only thing that will turn my brain off is some sort of lean back entertainment, such as TV or video games. Otherwise, why read about how to do something when I can practice it? It's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing.

beaumartinez 13y ago
> Work IS learning [...] it's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing. Come on. There's a big difference between being able to decide what to learn and at what pace, and being told by someone else to learn something as soon as possible so as to get work done.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Agreed. Anyone that doesn't believe that either is doing his own gig, has financial independence, or is drinking the Kool-Aid.
piyush_soni 13y ago
Exactly. When people shout it online "Get a life", they really don't understand for some people the work we do might really be fun, as horse riding, gambling, or drinking and dancing in pubs is for them.
- polskibus 13y ago
  Just beware blurring the line - it's sometimes first step towards burnout. I wanted to give a reference, here's an article from forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/04/01/10-signs-youre-burning-out-and-what-to-do-about-it/2/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/04/01/10-signs-yo... There are studies that show that work preoccupation outside working ours can be a sign of burnout (incoming or undergoing). I know it's great to love your job, that's what flow state is all about, but there can be a darker side to it as well.

alter_ego 13y ago

I would love to see a mandatory scheme whereby employees are free to work more than forty hours per week should they wish to do so, or are required to do so, but overtime payments are guaranteed, on an increasing scale, so by the time the employer has their staff working 100 hours per week they have had to pay more than say 6 weeks salary, possibly 8. This would quickly shake out the bulk of big corps who simply encourage presenteeism and other negative cultures.

nhangen 13y ago
As an employer in the tech industry, I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much, and I don't own a Fortune 500 company.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  And hence the need for labor laws to rein in employers. EDIT: If you don't like the rules, go open a company in another country. The ability to employ people is a privilege, governed by labor laws. You don't make the rules, you simply have to play by them.
  - nhangen 13y ago
    You act as if employment is a right. It's not. As I always say, if you don't like the rules, build your own company. Edit: 'The ability to employ people is a privilege.' I don't believe that, but as an exercise, remove that 'privilege' and tell me how many people would be able to survive long enough to have a hobby?
    - mhurron 13y ago
      >You act as if employment is a right No, he acts like companies can not be expected to even work in their own best interests. And he's right.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      As a business owner, you would employ workers at the lowest wage possible for as many hours as possible. This is why labor laws exist.

jessepollak 13y ago

I'd be really interested to know what kind of work this analysis is done on. Is it manual labor? Or repetitive data entry? Or writing code? I'd be interested to see a breakdown between these different categories. On this note, does anyone know the original paper where those graphs came from? I clicked through to the linked paper at the end, but no such graphs appeared.

jmduke 13y ago

A big distinction for me is "programming as work" and "programming as play". I can spend eight hours at work and be absolutely drained when I get home, but still leap at the chance to say, take a bite out of my functional programming course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun -- it's awesome, and taught by the guy who designed Scala, so he knows a thing or two) because its a completely different context for me, or scroll idly through GitHub issues as I eat dinner.

redblacktree 13y ago
Taking that class now. As a professional developer, it pains me to say: That class is fucking hard. I haven't managed a perfect score on an assignment yet, though I'm still working on Week 2. Good luck to you! It should be a great adventure regardless.

umsm 13y ago

After working in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, you need to have a good work/life balance. When I get home, I stay away from computers. I even contemplated not having a PC at home.

4hthth4 13y ago
I got rid of my TV, but not my computer.

diminoten 13y ago

Why must I stop working because other people don't like their jobs? The title tells me to "get a life", but maybe I like working 50 hours a week. I'm getting incredibly sick of people defensively justifying their own perceived laziness and then trying to tell me to work less. No, I fucking like my job, work is play for me.

pstack 13y ago

As someone who loves his job and loves to work, these articles always strike me as "I'm lazy and want to whine about it, because I would rather be sitting by the side of a pool somewhere, doing nothing". I'm sure it is a justifiable complaint if your job sucks and you hate everything about it, but the solution is to do what you can to find a better match between what you enjoy and what you do for a living rather than somehow demonizing "too much work". What almost everyone does who is posting here is not digging ditches or flipping burgers for 40hrs per week and we need to quit acting like it is.