11 ms·

Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers

170 points by wellpast 13y ago

badelynge 13y ago
Proves? Hasn't this been common knowledge for a long time? Why else would jobs that need workers that are creative, but not __too creative__ demand a 9-to-5 day?
wskinner 13y ago
The original title, "Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers", might be more appropriate.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
programminggeek 13y ago
It is completely unsurprising to me that this could be true. If you look at efficiency gains over the years relative to wages, people are working more and earning less. I think the statistic is something like we should be working like 15 hours a week to get the same productivity as was the norm in either 1950 or 1970. I think a lot of people would love to work half the time to make something like 2/3 or 3/4 of what they are making now, especially considering what wages should be given productivity increases. Let's face it, the reason the 40 hour workweek exists anymore is a habit, not because it's the correct amount of hours to work. Everyone expects a 40 hour work week because that's just what full time employment is supposed to be right?
- tokenizer 13y ago
  One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Almost every country in the world adheres to it more or less. We have set store hours at either 8 or 16 or 24 hours, again based on shifts of workers, and we have a complex economy that I'm sure our leaders would argue depends on it. Not saying I agree with that argument, or that something better isn't possible, just stating a potential defense to the "tradition" of our 40 hour work week. Any solution would take a ton of logistics and considerations in terms of wage parity during any transition period, less you want people starving because of bad policy. OR it would take one class of people, those who own the means of production, to create this policy on their own. I see no reason why they would.
  - eru 13y ago
    In lots of poorer economies people are asked to work more than 8 hours. In which countries are store hours are usually set at multiples of 8 hours? (I have never see that being usual. But then, I grew up in Europe.)
    - kamaal 13y ago
      My Dad is a cab driver. He was, when he was young a Bus driver. He used to routinely put in over time 12-13+ hours scale and generally used to report to the Bus Depot around 3 AM in the morning. I'm not sure if that counts as creative work, but its very stressful though. Note, this is in India.
  - weland 13y ago
    > One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Which I passionately hate. Banks around here strictly adhere to the 40-hour work week, which obviously results in banks only being open when, you know, everyone is at work. Consequently, if you need to interact with a human at the bank, the only option you have is to skip lunch break.
    - entropy_ 13y ago
      The solution to that where I live(Lebanon), is that banks have 40hr weeks but instead of 8x5 they are 7x5 + 1*5. That is, they work 8am=>3pm on weekdays and 8am=>1pm on Saturdays. It's definitely less than ideal but at least if you need to interact with an actual human at a bank and it's not extremely urgent, you just go there on Saturday.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Exactly; I need to take half a day off at work whenever I need to go to a bank. Or a barber. I don't understand why so many services have opening hours when most of the people are at work. Where do they get their clients from?
      - 13y ago
- xur17 13y ago
  I'm curious to see what company is first to use shorter work weeks as a perk (if it hasn't happened already) with a lower salary. I personally would love to work 20 or 30 hours a week, and have more time for side projects, etc. I think part of the problem is that an employee has a set of fixed costs (healthcare, hr, etc) that don't decrease as an employee works less hours.
  - xivzgrev 13y ago
    I agree, but man would it be tough for a company to offer this. As CEO you have shareholders, competitors, customers, blah blah blah all expecting growth or seeking to take your growth. So to do this, either a) everyone works more efficiently, but how many will hold themselves accountable to this? b) you hire more people, but creates more organizational complexity c) you ask people to work more hours Seems most companies would take C.
    - marcus_holmes 13y ago
      You do this by measuring productivity in terms of what each person actually achieves each day, not by how many hours they spend in the office. I have done this for a development team by agreeing milestones and targets for my team with both the developers involved and the internal customers. The devs are then responsible for hitting their targets, and notifying everyone else if they slip or are unable to meet them. The customers are responsible for notifying everyone if the requirements or context changes. I was responsible for notifying everyone if the priorities changed. It then became the dev's responsibility to determine how many and which hours they needed to work to achieve the goals set, with some simple rules (like a maximum of 8 hours coding per day and 6 days working in a row). We had some weekly meetings that the entire team needed to show up at, otherwise it was their call. They could work from home or from the office, although we generally preferred office because of the network effects. If they completed a task early, they got to go home if they wanted (some didn't). We got some flak from other departments because it appeared to them that we were never around, but they got used to it. The fact that we were consistently hitting deadlines was a HUGE plus to the whole thing; they could see this worked. As a bonus, we had decent support cover for some of the evening and night shifts as there were devs who preferred working those hours. TL;DR: Don't measure people on how long they sit behind their desks. Measure them on what they actually do. Then set targets based on what you expect someone to do in a week. Then send them home once they've hit target. To grow the company, set harder targets.
- xivzgrev 13y ago
  Unfortunately capitalism gets in the way. Suppose you're a factory owner with 4 workers working 40 hours per week. You invest in a new machine that lets everyone be twice as productive. If you don't have demand for the extra output, then do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go? Think the far more common solution is to let two people go. So even though productivity went up, hours worked per week stayed constant. And I think 40 hours per week is status quo. Suppose you get a job offer, and ask to work just 30 hours per week. There are a number of forces conspiring against you: 1) If you're salaried, the employer would see this as less efficient (even if you're actually more efficient) 2) If you're used to a particular way of living, 30 hours could entail pay cut 3) Others are willing to work 40 hours per week, and hence employer gets more "value" out of hiring someone else per week I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss. Friend of mine works as a UI consultant and bills out at $200 per hour, works maybe 20-30 hours per week. It's a brilliant gig.
  - annnnd 13y ago
    I don't think the factory owner example applies here (the article is talking about creative workers. And I also think that a lot of stuff is negotiable - you just need to show your worth. It is all too easy to go the same path as all others did, just because we think this is somehow expected of us. But then again, I work 9-5 too and hate it (just the working hours, not the job), so I guess I should fix that first before I lecture others... ;)
    - xivzgrev 13y ago
      Totally agree that article is talking about creative workers. But the factory example is concrete and great for a basic discussion on the question of "why the hell are we working so much when productivity has increased". And completely agree stuff is negotiable. But as mentioned, if not here then above, I think being your own boss has the highest possibility for that. For example, the ONLY people working <40 hours at my job are all independent contractors. They come in, do exactly what is asked, and GTFO. My company doesn't want them to "take on this as well" because every hour costs a pretty penny :).
  - 13y ago
- Avshalom 13y ago
  the reason the 40 hour week still exists is because (after much blood shed) we managed to make it difficult to expect a 50 hour work week or a 60 but I don't see any reason to think people wouldn't be sitting around writing essays about how maybe we should scale.down to 'just' 40 if we didn't have the existing labor laws in place.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The 40 hour week is also enshrined in law because our labor laws are codified around the ideal of factory jobs. If you want a job that has benefits then that's a "full time" job at ~40 hours a week, a 15 hour/week job is considered to be a completely different sort of beast by the government (something more akin to a temp summer job).
superJoy 13y ago
I only work when I feel I can be productive, and am currently averaging 6.5 hours per day. As a graduate student I am somewhat disconnected from the whole "show up at x, leave at f(x)" concept. I also tend to work on the weekend. Basically if something has to be done, I make time for it. The disadvantage to this approach is that whenever I want to meet people, I have to modify my schedule. There is value in the idea that everyone involved in a project is at the office for a mandated period of time. It may not be best for everyone, but it sure is nice to be able to interact with people without the ordeal of establishing a common meeting time.
arxpoetica 13y ago
As a creative, I easily could have told you this. ;)
greenyoda 13y ago
I think we may be overestimating how much of the average developer's job actually requires creativity. Most programming jobs combine creativity with more mundane work. For example, tracking down bugs or answering e-mail questions from co-workers or customers generally doesn't require the amount of creativity that solving a previously unsolved problem does. Neither does figuring out how some open source API works (whoever designed it originally did the heavy lifting for us). So if we reserve the hard stuff for our hours of peak creativity, we could optimize our creative output while still getting a lot of other useful stuff done in the remaining hours of an eight hour day. Even if my brain is completely fried, I can usually find something to do that pushes my work forward.
- GuiA 13y ago
  I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails. My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work 50% of the time). I think a lot of people would agree that this falls within "creative work". And yet she also does a lot of tedious things, like applying several layers of varnish to a finished piece, repeating a certain pattern hundreds of times (eg. feathers on a bird), etc (and this doesn't include stuff like generating invoices with clients, scheduling times to talk with them, etc.). What's the ultimate "creative job" to you? I think that a developer's job (unless you're in something ~extremely~ repetitive) is highly creative- just that highly creative jobs still have a lot of tediousness. I was in research for a while, which I'd consider "creative", but I spent a lot of my time doing things like reviewing paper drafts for typos, figuring out why some code wouldn't compile, etc. Even in the most creative job ever, 90% of your work will likely be "daily grind".
  - derefr 13y ago
    > What's the ultimate "creative job" to you? I'd hazard "Creative Director." You know, the role the creator of a character or story setting (e.g. Stan Lee) gets put in when they consult on a movie tie-in. Basically involves talking to people and writing down what you talked about to make sure everyone has your vision in their head. ("Game Designer" is also a pretty isomorphic job, given the games industry.)
bonjourmr 13y ago
On a related note, I would even prefer working 4 days for 10 hours to make this quota if absolutely necessary, and though I am not particularly supportive of said work hours per week, I do obey the system. I understand that there may have some W/OHS related issues with this of course. I wonder what sort of impacts these things would have on things of a grander scale, such as the economy, transport, employment rates, inflation etc. I refer to either lowering the hours & pay per employee per week (as discussed in other comments) or overlapping shifts such as half the employees work 38 hrs Mon>Thu and the other half working 38 hrs Tue>Fri (rough schedule of course). Have there been any remotely similar studies on this?
- techsupporter 13y ago
  Sure, it's called most any support/operations team in large IT shops. Since most IT places staff ops and helpdesk for coverage, they get more creative and flexible with shifts. Developers are seen as task-oriented so they get the business hours when the boss is in the office. A 4x10 shift is what keeps me in my current role, by and large (also because I work a "shift," I can completely cut off from work when I'm not at work because other people are paid to work the other hours). Our current shifts run 10 hours days, 10 hours swings, and 10 hours nights with each "side" of the week working four days. Each shift on the same side of the week overlaps with the preceding and following shift by two hours and all shifts overlap at some point on Wednesday.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar? Because in my experience, for most software centric companies it's just a paper obligation which is ignored with mutual agreement as long as the job gets done. In fact, I don't know of anybody still forced to work 9-to-5 without a contextual reason (opening hours, shifts etc).
- aianus 13y ago
  There's a lot of social pressure to be in the office during the core hours. People will schedule meetings onto your calendar during those hours and expect you to be able to make it, etc.
- VexXtreme 13y ago
  > Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar? I used to work at such place. The "office hours" were 9-6 and people were expected to adhere to that. I was an architect on a project and engaged in highly creative work so I tried to make my hours slightly more flexible, because honestly, my output was very high and I didn't think it mattered whether I was there 9-6, 10-7 or whatever. Soon enough I got called into a meeting with the company president and an HR person and was sternly told that if I didn't start showing up at 9am straight that I would be let go. I tried to argue that the hours don't really matter for creative work and was told "Don't try to make this company into something it's not". Some places are completely fucked up and beyond toxic. It also just so happens they're run by idiots.
- guangnan 13y ago
  There is no such thing as job gets done. There are always jobs waiting for you.
- ryanbrunner 13y ago
  I think that might be the wrong way of asking that question. I don't know many people who are forced to work from 9 AM to 5 PM specifically, but I do know plenty of places where there's an expectation that you're putting in more than 40 hours a week regardless of how much work you're getting done, and a manager not seeing anyone in the development team's area at 6:30 is in and of itself a problem, regardless of whether the sprint is finished. In fact, one place where I don't see this attitude at all is a place that does enforce a strict 9-6 schedule. It's more than 40 hours a week, but they're extremely rigid about it - no laptops go home, and working outside of those hours is more or less prohibited.
teddyh 13y ago
I wish I had a 9-to-5. In Sweden, business hours are 8-5. They still call it an 8 hour workday, since they exclude the lunch hour.
- guangnan 13y ago
  China is the same. The norm is 9-to-6.
  - dongchongyubing 13y ago
    not true for gongwuyuan
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Same in the US, we just call it 9-5 anyway.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Move over to Finland. True 9-to-5 workday. 30min lunchbreak and 37.5h work week.
kamaal 13y ago
Well, reading this article makes me wonder where I'm. If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night. I am sleep deprived regularly, often I just come to home totally tired after work and travel. Only to find I have to pick myself up and throw in another 5-6 hours. Add to this stress when things don't workout,an occasional bad day and occasions when I have to face failure after days of work. Plus I have a family to which I have to tend to. Often they feel I'm just not spending time with them. I completely agree that currently I'm in some sort of tiring march. I'm tired already. I see wins rarely, but continue to put in record efforts. On the other hand, I see the only reason I'm doing this is because. a. To some extent I enjoy what I'm doing. b. I want the money. c. I see I'm literally getting addicted to it. d. If I don't put such efforts, I feel guilty that I might just be getting lazy, or under performing. e. There are good deal of people whom I would like to prove wrong. I've discussed this with my mentor, who is a veteran of 3 successful start up's and has had a great career so far. He tells the modern internet techie's narrative of stress and tiredness is just plain whining, complaining and asking for sympathy. Though he agrees its a little stressful and tiring. Smart people eventually realize achieving something big demands hard sacrifices. I also see many other smart successful people putting ridiculous efforts day in and out to win. And its in every profession. Whether its sports, medicine, software, hardware etc. I feel at the end of the day, its just like a rubber band. You can stretch until it breaks. Some people just practice it stretching enough number of times to keep the breaking point a little high. After some time you just get numb, and absorb failures, stress, big sacrifices and just keep moving forward. And then what happens doesn't really matter.
- Nursie 13y ago
  >>If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night. You people are crazy! Now sure, you may achieve something huge and it might all be worth it. But in the mean time you're missing what remains of your youth and neglecting your family. You don't have to put that sort of time in to 'win' at life with software. You can make really good money and live a life inaccessible to 99.5% of the world's population by working 37 hours and being good at it. If you need to be part of the 0.5% then don't let me put you off trying, but I'd be giving serious thought to whether I really needed it or if my life would he better scaling it back and taking time with loved ones.
thu 13y ago
And yet, the only way for me to bootstrap my own company is by working those 40 hours per week and working at home after the one-hour commute, and on weekend. Now it's no longer 40 hours as I have swapped job and work only 4 days per week instead of five. And I would say that I even have to be more "creative" since bootstrapping a company involves a lot more different work than a regular day job. But still I agree with the article; it's been a long time since I promised myself to offer a four-day flexible week to my future employees.
Evgeny 13y ago
Today, workers are putting in increasingly more hours(!)—so much so that the 40-hour week has become a relic of the past. (!) - in the US/UK, I guess, and some other countries ... I moved to Denmark recently, there are goods and bads, but the 37-hour work week is almost a religion. And there are 6 weeks holidays per year. Creativity and innovation should be safe in this country.
JackMorgan 13y ago
The really funny thing, my wife works at a sort of creative job writing helicopter manuals, and all her coworkers call her crazy for only working 40 hours: they all actually get overtime pay!
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I was surprised about the article content about the brain taking up to 4 hours to ramp up in the morning. I usually work (mostly) from home and I find the three hours when I first wake up from about 6 to 9am are my most productive. I usually then take 2 or 3 hours off for hiking or other exercise, then start working again. Sometimes I also work for an hour after dinner. I am working as a contractor on-site at Google right now, and it is challenging working non-stop without long breaks. I get into work by 6:30am and the first three hours is great (quiet, almost no one there, and also that is my best time of day). I find that short 15 minute walking around the block breaks don't really reset me back into work mode like a long hike does.
jotm 13y ago
"Kellogg’s discovered, was that employees were happy to work less when they were paid 12.5% more per hour, meaning the company was able to offer more jobs" I don't get it, how were they able to offer more jobs when they paid the same wage (6hrs/day with a 12.5% increase)?
- ksmiley 13y ago
  Perhaps Kellogg's limiting factor was not their salary budget, but maximum occupancy on their assembly lines. Switching from eight hours to six means you can hire a whole additional shift of workers, assuming the machines run 24 hours a day. If 6 hour workers are 112.5% as productive per hour as 8 hour workers, then this turns out to be a good deal for Kellogg's.
  - jotm 13y ago
    Oh, that makes sense!
moron4hire 13y ago
I've been saying for a while now that the only problem with the 9-to-5 schedule is its adherents' insistence that it's the only valid lifestyle.
mrcactu5 13y ago
A shorter workday works particularly well for knowledge workers—people in creative or professional jobs—who can work productively for about six hours a day, compared to the eight hours manual laborers can churn out, according to Salon. Since when do we care about the well-being of manual workers - or professionals? The focus on management has been to (fail to ) extract as much labor as they can from their workers and paying them the least. This can be formalized through various management mumbo jumbo. How do we re-educate managers to "risk" losing productivity by trying these alternative means?
kbelbina 13y ago
I run a consultancy so its easier but we pay hourly and provide benefits (payroll taxes, health, 401k). People can work whatever hours they want and from where ever they just keep the team updated and request a workload consistent with their expected hours. I have team members who work 50 hours a week and some who work 20 hours.

170 points by wellpast 13y ago

Proves? Hasn't this been common knowledge for a long time? Why else would jobs that need workers that are creative, but not __too creative__ demand a 9-to-5 day?

wskinner 13y ago

The original title, "Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers", might be more appropriate.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

programminggeek 13y ago

It is completely unsurprising to me that this could be true. If you look at efficiency gains over the years relative to wages, people are working more and earning less. I think the statistic is something like we should be working like 15 hours a week to get the same productivity as was the norm in either 1950 or 1970. I think a lot of people would love to work half the time to make something like 2/3 or 3/4 of what they are making now, especially considering what wages should be given productivity increases. Let's face it, the reason the 40 hour workweek exists anymore is a habit, not because it's the correct amount of hours to work. Everyone expects a 40 hour work week because that's just what full time employment is supposed to be right?

tokenizer 13y ago
One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Almost every country in the world adheres to it more or less. We have set store hours at either 8 or 16 or 24 hours, again based on shifts of workers, and we have a complex economy that I'm sure our leaders would argue depends on it. Not saying I agree with that argument, or that something better isn't possible, just stating a potential defense to the "tradition" of our 40 hour work week. Any solution would take a ton of logistics and considerations in terms of wage parity during any transition period, less you want people starving because of bad policy. OR it would take one class of people, those who own the means of production, to create this policy on their own. I see no reason why they would.
- eru 13y ago
  In lots of poorer economies people are asked to work more than 8 hours. In which countries are store hours are usually set at multiples of 8 hours? (I have never see that being usual. But then, I grew up in Europe.)
  - kamaal 13y ago
    My Dad is a cab driver. He was, when he was young a Bus driver. He used to routinely put in over time 12-13+ hours scale and generally used to report to the Bus Depot around 3 AM in the morning. I'm not sure if that counts as creative work, but its very stressful though. Note, this is in India.
- weland 13y ago
  > One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Which I passionately hate. Banks around here strictly adhere to the 40-hour work week, which obviously results in banks only being open when, you know, everyone is at work. Consequently, if you need to interact with a human at the bank, the only option you have is to skip lunch break.
  - entropy_ 13y ago
    The solution to that where I live(Lebanon), is that banks have 40hr weeks but instead of 8x5 they are 7x5 + 1*5. That is, they work 8am=>3pm on weekdays and 8am=>1pm on Saturdays. It's definitely less than ideal but at least if you need to interact with an actual human at a bank and it's not extremely urgent, you just go there on Saturday.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Exactly; I need to take half a day off at work whenever I need to go to a bank. Or a barber. I don't understand why so many services have opening hours when most of the people are at work. Where do they get their clients from?
    - 13y ago
xur17 13y ago
I'm curious to see what company is first to use shorter work weeks as a perk (if it hasn't happened already) with a lower salary. I personally would love to work 20 or 30 hours a week, and have more time for side projects, etc. I think part of the problem is that an employee has a set of fixed costs (healthcare, hr, etc) that don't decrease as an employee works less hours.
- xivzgrev 13y ago
  I agree, but man would it be tough for a company to offer this. As CEO you have shareholders, competitors, customers, blah blah blah all expecting growth or seeking to take your growth. So to do this, either a) everyone works more efficiently, but how many will hold themselves accountable to this? b) you hire more people, but creates more organizational complexity c) you ask people to work more hours Seems most companies would take C.
  - marcus_holmes 13y ago
    You do this by measuring productivity in terms of what each person actually achieves each day, not by how many hours they spend in the office. I have done this for a development team by agreeing milestones and targets for my team with both the developers involved and the internal customers. The devs are then responsible for hitting their targets, and notifying everyone else if they slip or are unable to meet them. The customers are responsible for notifying everyone if the requirements or context changes. I was responsible for notifying everyone if the priorities changed. It then became the dev's responsibility to determine how many and which hours they needed to work to achieve the goals set, with some simple rules (like a maximum of 8 hours coding per day and 6 days working in a row). We had some weekly meetings that the entire team needed to show up at, otherwise it was their call. They could work from home or from the office, although we generally preferred office because of the network effects. If they completed a task early, they got to go home if they wanted (some didn't). We got some flak from other departments because it appeared to them that we were never around, but they got used to it. The fact that we were consistently hitting deadlines was a HUGE plus to the whole thing; they could see this worked. As a bonus, we had decent support cover for some of the evening and night shifts as there were devs who preferred working those hours. TL;DR: Don't measure people on how long they sit behind their desks. Measure them on what they actually do. Then set targets based on what you expect someone to do in a week. Then send them home once they've hit target. To grow the company, set harder targets.
xivzgrev 13y ago
Unfortunately capitalism gets in the way. Suppose you're a factory owner with 4 workers working 40 hours per week. You invest in a new machine that lets everyone be twice as productive. If you don't have demand for the extra output, then do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go? Think the far more common solution is to let two people go. So even though productivity went up, hours worked per week stayed constant. And I think 40 hours per week is status quo. Suppose you get a job offer, and ask to work just 30 hours per week. There are a number of forces conspiring against you: 1) If you're salaried, the employer would see this as less efficient (even if you're actually more efficient) 2) If you're used to a particular way of living, 30 hours could entail pay cut 3) Others are willing to work 40 hours per week, and hence employer gets more "value" out of hiring someone else per week I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss. Friend of mine works as a UI consultant and bills out at $200 per hour, works maybe 20-30 hours per week. It's a brilliant gig.
- annnnd 13y ago
  I don't think the factory owner example applies here (the article is talking about creative workers. And I also think that a lot of stuff is negotiable - you just need to show your worth. It is all too easy to go the same path as all others did, just because we think this is somehow expected of us. But then again, I work 9-5 too and hate it (just the working hours, not the job), so I guess I should fix that first before I lecture others... ;)
  - xivzgrev 13y ago
    Totally agree that article is talking about creative workers. But the factory example is concrete and great for a basic discussion on the question of "why the hell are we working so much when productivity has increased". And completely agree stuff is negotiable. But as mentioned, if not here then above, I think being your own boss has the highest possibility for that. For example, the ONLY people working <40 hours at my job are all independent contractors. They come in, do exactly what is asked, and GTFO. My company doesn't want them to "take on this as well" because every hour costs a pretty penny :).
- 13y ago
Avshalom 13y ago
the reason the 40 hour week still exists is because (after much blood shed) we managed to make it difficult to expect a 50 hour work week or a 60 but I don't see any reason to think people wouldn't be sitting around writing essays about how maybe we should scale.down to 'just' 40 if we didn't have the existing labor laws in place.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
The 40 hour week is also enshrined in law because our labor laws are codified around the ideal of factory jobs. If you want a job that has benefits then that's a "full time" job at ~40 hours a week, a 15 hour/week job is considered to be a completely different sort of beast by the government (something more akin to a temp summer job).

superJoy 13y ago

I only work when I feel I can be productive, and am currently averaging 6.5 hours per day. As a graduate student I am somewhat disconnected from the whole "show up at x, leave at f(x)" concept. I also tend to work on the weekend. Basically if something has to be done, I make time for it. The disadvantage to this approach is that whenever I want to meet people, I have to modify my schedule. There is value in the idea that everyone involved in a project is at the office for a mandated period of time. It may not be best for everyone, but it sure is nice to be able to interact with people without the ordeal of establishing a common meeting time.

arxpoetica 13y ago

As a creative, I easily could have told you this. ;)

greenyoda 13y ago

I think we may be overestimating how much of the average developer's job actually requires creativity. Most programming jobs combine creativity with more mundane work. For example, tracking down bugs or answering e-mail questions from co-workers or customers generally doesn't require the amount of creativity that solving a previously unsolved problem does. Neither does figuring out how some open source API works (whoever designed it originally did the heavy lifting for us). So if we reserve the hard stuff for our hours of peak creativity, we could optimize our creative output while still getting a lot of other useful stuff done in the remaining hours of an eight hour day. Even if my brain is completely fried, I can usually find something to do that pushes my work forward.

GuiA 13y ago
I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails. My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work 50% of the time). I think a lot of people would agree that this falls within "creative work". And yet she also does a lot of tedious things, like applying several layers of varnish to a finished piece, repeating a certain pattern hundreds of times (eg. feathers on a bird), etc (and this doesn't include stuff like generating invoices with clients, scheduling times to talk with them, etc.). What's the ultimate "creative job" to you? I think that a developer's job (unless you're in something ~extremely~ repetitive) is highly creative- just that highly creative jobs still have a lot of tediousness. I was in research for a while, which I'd consider "creative", but I spent a lot of my time doing things like reviewing paper drafts for typos, figuring out why some code wouldn't compile, etc. Even in the most creative job ever, 90% of your work will likely be "daily grind".
- derefr 13y ago
  > What's the ultimate "creative job" to you? I'd hazard "Creative Director." You know, the role the creator of a character or story setting (e.g. Stan Lee) gets put in when they consult on a movie tie-in. Basically involves talking to people and writing down what you talked about to make sure everyone has your vision in their head. ("Game Designer" is also a pretty isomorphic job, given the games industry.)

bonjourmr 13y ago

On a related note, I would even prefer working 4 days for 10 hours to make this quota if absolutely necessary, and though I am not particularly supportive of said work hours per week, I do obey the system. I understand that there may have some W/OHS related issues with this of course. I wonder what sort of impacts these things would have on things of a grander scale, such as the economy, transport, employment rates, inflation etc. I refer to either lowering the hours & pay per employee per week (as discussed in other comments) or overlapping shifts such as half the employees work 38 hrs Mon>Thu and the other half working 38 hrs Tue>Fri (rough schedule of course). Have there been any remotely similar studies on this?

techsupporter 13y ago
Sure, it's called most any support/operations team in large IT shops. Since most IT places staff ops and helpdesk for coverage, they get more creative and flexible with shifts. Developers are seen as task-oriented so they get the business hours when the boss is in the office. A 4x10 shift is what keeps me in my current role, by and large (also because I work a "shift," I can completely cut off from work when I'm not at work because other people are paid to work the other hours). Our current shifts run 10 hours days, 10 hours swings, and 10 hours nights with each "side" of the week working four days. Each shift on the same side of the week overlaps with the preceding and following shift by two hours and all shifts overlap at some point on Wednesday.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar? Because in my experience, for most software centric companies it's just a paper obligation which is ignored with mutual agreement as long as the job gets done. In fact, I don't know of anybody still forced to work 9-to-5 without a contextual reason (opening hours, shifts etc).

aianus 13y ago
There's a lot of social pressure to be in the office during the core hours. People will schedule meetings onto your calendar during those hours and expect you to be able to make it, etc.
VexXtreme 13y ago
> Are there any non-self employed developers/engineers here that are still being "forced" to work 9-to-5 or similar? I used to work at such place. The "office hours" were 9-6 and people were expected to adhere to that. I was an architect on a project and engaged in highly creative work so I tried to make my hours slightly more flexible, because honestly, my output was very high and I didn't think it mattered whether I was there 9-6, 10-7 or whatever. Soon enough I got called into a meeting with the company president and an HR person and was sternly told that if I didn't start showing up at 9am straight that I would be let go. I tried to argue that the hours don't really matter for creative work and was told "Don't try to make this company into something it's not". Some places are completely fucked up and beyond toxic. It also just so happens they're run by idiots.
guangnan 13y ago
There is no such thing as job gets done. There are always jobs waiting for you.
ryanbrunner 13y ago
I think that might be the wrong way of asking that question. I don't know many people who are forced to work from 9 AM to 5 PM specifically, but I do know plenty of places where there's an expectation that you're putting in more than 40 hours a week regardless of how much work you're getting done, and a manager not seeing anyone in the development team's area at 6:30 is in and of itself a problem, regardless of whether the sprint is finished. In fact, one place where I don't see this attitude at all is a place that does enforce a strict 9-6 schedule. It's more than 40 hours a week, but they're extremely rigid about it - no laptops go home, and working outside of those hours is more or less prohibited.

teddyh 13y ago

I wish I had a 9-to-5. In Sweden, business hours are 8-5. They still call it an 8 hour workday, since they exclude the lunch hour.

guangnan 13y ago
China is the same. The norm is 9-to-6.
- dongchongyubing 13y ago
  not true for gongwuyuan
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Same in the US, we just call it 9-5 anyway.
nawitus 13y ago
Move over to Finland. True 9-to-5 workday. 30min lunchbreak and 37.5h work week.

kamaal 13y ago

Well, reading this article makes me wonder where I'm. If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night. I am sleep deprived regularly, often I just come to home totally tired after work and travel. Only to find I have to pick myself up and throw in another 5-6 hours. Add to this stress when things don't workout,an occasional bad day and occasions when I have to face failure after days of work. Plus I have a family to which I have to tend to. Often they feel I'm just not spending time with them. I completely agree that currently I'm in some sort of tiring march. I'm tired already. I see wins rarely, but continue to put in record efforts. On the other hand, I see the only reason I'm doing this is because. a. To some extent I enjoy what I'm doing. b. I want the money. c. I see I'm literally getting addicted to it. d. If I don't put such efforts, I feel guilty that I might just be getting lazy, or under performing. e. There are good deal of people whom I would like to prove wrong. I've discussed this with my mentor, who is a veteran of 3 successful start up's and has had a great career so far. He tells the modern internet techie's narrative of stress and tiredness is just plain whining, complaining and asking for sympathy. Though he agrees its a little stressful and tiring. Smart people eventually realize achieving something big demands hard sacrifices. I also see many other smart successful people putting ridiculous efforts day in and out to win. And its in every profession. Whether its sports, medicine, software, hardware etc. I feel at the end of the day, its just like a rubber band. You can stretch until it breaks. Some people just practice it stretching enough number of times to keep the breaking point a little high. After some time you just get numb, and absorb failures, stress, big sacrifices and just keep moving forward. And then what happens doesn't really matter.

Nursie 13y ago
>>If a 40 work week is tough, what about people like me who are having a routine 40 hour work week job and trying to bootstrap a company/work on side projects by the evening and night. You people are crazy! Now sure, you may achieve something huge and it might all be worth it. But in the mean time you're missing what remains of your youth and neglecting your family. You don't have to put that sort of time in to 'win' at life with software. You can make really good money and live a life inaccessible to 99.5% of the world's population by working 37 hours and being good at it. If you need to be part of the 0.5% then don't let me put you off trying, but I'd be giving serious thought to whether I really needed it or if my life would he better scaling it back and taking time with loved ones.

thu 13y ago

And yet, the only way for me to bootstrap my own company is by working those 40 hours per week and working at home after the one-hour commute, and on weekend. Now it's no longer 40 hours as I have swapped job and work only 4 days per week instead of five. And I would say that I even have to be more "creative" since bootstrapping a company involves a lot more different work than a regular day job. But still I agree with the article; it's been a long time since I promised myself to offer a four-day flexible week to my future employees.

Evgeny 13y ago

Today, workers are putting in increasingly more hours(!)—so much so that the 40-hour week has become a relic of the past. (!) - in the US/UK, I guess, and some other countries ... I moved to Denmark recently, there are goods and bads, but the 37-hour work week is almost a religion. And there are 6 weeks holidays per year. Creativity and innovation should be safe in this country.

JackMorgan 13y ago

The really funny thing, my wife works at a sort of creative job writing helicopter manuals, and all her coworkers call her crazy for only working 40 hours: they all actually get overtime pay!

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I was surprised about the article content about the brain taking up to 4 hours to ramp up in the morning. I usually work (mostly) from home and I find the three hours when I first wake up from about 6 to 9am are my most productive. I usually then take 2 or 3 hours off for hiking or other exercise, then start working again. Sometimes I also work for an hour after dinner. I am working as a contractor on-site at Google right now, and it is challenging working non-stop without long breaks. I get into work by 6:30am and the first three hours is great (quiet, almost no one there, and also that is my best time of day). I find that short 15 minute walking around the block breaks don't really reset me back into work mode like a long hike does.

jotm 13y ago

"Kellogg’s discovered, was that employees were happy to work less when they were paid 12.5% more per hour, meaning the company was able to offer more jobs" I don't get it, how were they able to offer more jobs when they paid the same wage (6hrs/day with a 12.5% increase)?

ksmiley 13y ago
Perhaps Kellogg's limiting factor was not their salary budget, but maximum occupancy on their assembly lines. Switching from eight hours to six means you can hire a whole additional shift of workers, assuming the machines run 24 hours a day. If 6 hour workers are 112.5% as productive per hour as 8 hour workers, then this turns out to be a good deal for Kellogg's.
- jotm 13y ago
  Oh, that makes sense!

moron4hire 13y ago

I've been saying for a while now that the only problem with the 9-to-5 schedule is its adherents' insistence that it's the only valid lifestyle.

mrcactu5 13y ago

A shorter workday works particularly well for knowledge workers—people in creative or professional jobs—who can work productively for about six hours a day, compared to the eight hours manual laborers can churn out, according to Salon. Since when do we care about the well-being of manual workers - or professionals? The focus on management has been to (fail to ) extract as much labor as they can from their workers and paying them the least. This can be formalized through various management mumbo jumbo. How do we re-educate managers to "risk" losing productivity by trying these alternative means?

kbelbina 13y ago

I run a consultancy so its easier but we pay hourly and provide benefits (payroll taxes, health, 401k). People can work whatever hours they want and from where ever they just keep the team updated and request a workload consistent with their expected hours. I have team members who work 50 hours a week and some who work 20 hours.