5 ms·

Anecdotally: while the NYT suggests that two employees who are indistinguishable from one another make it easier to grant them flexible hours, I think that tact

by patio11 12y ago

Anecdotally: while the NYT suggests that two employees who are indistinguishable from one another make it easier to grant them flexible hours, I think that tactically, you're much, much more likely to get flexible hours (along with "anything else you want") if nobody substitutes for what you do. This is also likely underlying the observation "a lot of firms quietly offer better-than-standard flexibility to a small section of their employees." Of course they do, for exactly the same reason that they quietly offer better-than-standard salaries. Somebody with something they wanted said "The price of us working together is X, Y, Z, and I work from home 2 days a week." and the firm said "Cool, we can live with that."

michaelt 12y ago
Presumably it also depends on whether the work can be time-shifted, and how far in advance you can make changes and still be 'flexible'. A developer who wants flexible hours - probably fine, as long as the work gets done. An actor who wants to sometimes not show up at the theatre, or a doctor with patients' appointments, or a sales person who has meetings with clients? They're probably going to want to keep those commitments once they've been made.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  Yes. And for some jobs, working half time for personal reasons cuts your productivity by far more than half. To illustrate: Assume your time is spent 25%/75% for coordination/execution activities, respectively. If you cut your hours in half, you may end up working 25%/25% coordination/execution, which results in a net output 1/3 of what it was. Of course that's just for illustration. In reality, maybe the time being cut out is full of bogus meetings and waiting for replies to emails.
  - VLM 12y ago
    And interruptions. Never forget interruptions. If I have serious work to do I'll push it off until Sunday then work Sunday and take comp time during the week. Get into the flow and go go go with no interruptions. Its hopeless to do something large and complicated on Wednesday when the mean time between interruptions is about 15 minutes. If I didn't have a Mon-Fri wife and some kids, I'd probably work 4 10s, Saturday thru Tuesday. 4 10s also helps because to put it bluntly most of the distractions will not be in the office at the start and/or end of my day, so I can get much more done. Needless to say this is a direct slap in the face of the "open plan office" religious belief so this can be a bit controversial. A lot of this is cultural. If I'm at work on Wednesday and everyone knows it, its utterly forbidden for me culturally here as a major violation of taboo to do anything other that totally drop everything I'm doing no matter what and immediately react / respond, no matter if phone, email, or (when we still used it) IM/SMS. Doesn't matter if its important or trivial. If its known I will not be at work on Friday or even if I just call in sick on Wednesday, even if its the same request from the same person, culturally its perfectly OK to let it sit until I arrive at work next week, unless its a total emergency and then they call me at home. Aren't people just crazy? Its a CYA thing where if I'm here there is no higher priority than instantaneous response not matter what under any circumstances, but being outside of work hours or out sick or on vacation is a perfect magical mirror-like CYA shield.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - levosmetalo 12y ago
    No, if coordination is one of the job activities, then it is also part of your job output. If not, then why doing it at all?
    - humanrebar 12y ago
      Athletes get paid to win games, not practice. A certain amount of practice and study may be necessary for good teamwork, even though it's not the desired output on its own.
      - levosmetalo 12y ago
        As long as someone pays by the hour, that billable time includes whatever activities are required for work. When company pays me only for the output, then I would be free to work from whatever place during whatever hours as long as I produce the desired output.
- waps 12y ago
  It mostly makes things a lot harder on managers, in order to make things easier on employees. So it doesn't happen. Like anything else, clearly a little ease for the powerful is worth massive inconvenience of the less powerful.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
If you like academic papers, there is a great one by Claudia Goldin. Her topic of interest is gender pay gaps (boring), but it goes into detail on pay nonlinearities which is quite interesting. Basically, she goes into a lot of literature and does some work herself showing that for many jobs, work output is a nonlinear (e.g. y=x^2) function of hours worked. A nonlinear pay function is generally related directly to nonlinear work output. Her working example is pharmacists - you can easily swap two half-time pharmacists for 1 full time one or vice versa. On the other hand, consider your top trader - his job is keeping the entire strategy in his head (roughly a 30 hour/week job) and being around when the market is open (another 35 hours/week). You can't replace him with 2 30 hour/week traders, each of whom keeps half the strategy in their head and are available half the time. http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103 http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph... Flexible hours will, of course, be more prevalent in jobs and industries where Output(hours) is a linear function. (Gender pay gaps are not intrinsically boring, but the inherent "turn of your mind because politics" makes it far less interesting.)
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  Ties in well with Paul Graham's essay "Mind the Gap": It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? [6] These things don't scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it's concentrated in one individual. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
  - asgard1024 12y ago
    This Paul Graham's essay is hands down the best argument for libertarianism I have ever read. Yet, even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that), this doesn't entirely account for some 7 or so magnitudes of wealth and income disparities we see in the real world. The problem is, in modern society, almost nobody deserves to be paid for the work they do (I don't know about you, but my life would be exactly the same without Steve Jobs and random American athletes). We have automated almost everything, and the biggest chunk of productivity is due to capital (and innovations of our ancestors). So the question, how is this capital controlled and distributed, becomes central. (That's why many people here so oppose intellectual property - essentially the privatization of public information, which is analogous to land enclosures during 18th century.) So I think, if someone genuinely thinks that people should be paid based on value which they personally bring to society, he shoots himself to the foot. This value is probably too small for a living wage. That doesn't mean the improvements are not useful; it's just all the low hanging fruits have already been harvested.

by patio11 12y ago

michaelt 12y ago

Presumably it also depends on whether the work can be time-shifted, and how far in advance you can make changes and still be 'flexible'. A developer who wants flexible hours - probably fine, as long as the work gets done. An actor who wants to sometimes not show up at the theatre, or a doctor with patients' appointments, or a sales person who has meetings with clients? They're probably going to want to keep those commitments once they've been made.

humanrebar 12y ago
Yes. And for some jobs, working half time for personal reasons cuts your productivity by far more than half. To illustrate: Assume your time is spent 25%/75% for coordination/execution activities, respectively. If you cut your hours in half, you may end up working 25%/25% coordination/execution, which results in a net output 1/3 of what it was. Of course that's just for illustration. In reality, maybe the time being cut out is full of bogus meetings and waiting for replies to emails.
- VLM 12y ago
  And interruptions. Never forget interruptions. If I have serious work to do I'll push it off until Sunday then work Sunday and take comp time during the week. Get into the flow and go go go with no interruptions. Its hopeless to do something large and complicated on Wednesday when the mean time between interruptions is about 15 minutes. If I didn't have a Mon-Fri wife and some kids, I'd probably work 4 10s, Saturday thru Tuesday. 4 10s also helps because to put it bluntly most of the distractions will not be in the office at the start and/or end of my day, so I can get much more done. Needless to say this is a direct slap in the face of the "open plan office" religious belief so this can be a bit controversial. A lot of this is cultural. If I'm at work on Wednesday and everyone knows it, its utterly forbidden for me culturally here as a major violation of taboo to do anything other that totally drop everything I'm doing no matter what and immediately react / respond, no matter if phone, email, or (when we still used it) IM/SMS. Doesn't matter if its important or trivial. If its known I will not be at work on Friday or even if I just call in sick on Wednesday, even if its the same request from the same person, culturally its perfectly OK to let it sit until I arrive at work next week, unless its a total emergency and then they call me at home. Aren't people just crazy? Its a CYA thing where if I'm here there is no higher priority than instantaneous response not matter what under any circumstances, but being outside of work hours or out sick or on vacation is a perfect magical mirror-like CYA shield.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- levosmetalo 12y ago
  No, if coordination is one of the job activities, then it is also part of your job output. If not, then why doing it at all?
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    Athletes get paid to win games, not practice. A certain amount of practice and study may be necessary for good teamwork, even though it's not the desired output on its own.
    - levosmetalo 12y ago
      As long as someone pays by the hour, that billable time includes whatever activities are required for work. When company pays me only for the output, then I would be free to work from whatever place during whatever hours as long as I produce the desired output.
waps 12y ago
It mostly makes things a lot harder on managers, in order to make things easier on employees. So it doesn't happen. Like anything else, clearly a little ease for the powerful is worth massive inconvenience of the less powerful.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

If you like academic papers, there is a great one by Claudia Goldin. Her topic of interest is gender pay gaps (boring), but it goes into detail on pay nonlinearities which is quite interesting. Basically, she goes into a lot of literature and does some work herself showing that for many jobs, work output is a nonlinear (e.g. y=x^2) function of hours worked. A nonlinear pay function is generally related directly to nonlinear work output. Her working example is pharmacists - you can easily swap two half-time pharmacists for 1 full time one or vice versa. On the other hand, consider your top trader - his job is keeping the entire strategy in his head (roughly a 30 hour/week job) and being around when the market is open (another 35 hours/week). You can't replace him with 2 30 hour/week traders, each of whom keeps half the strategy in their head and are available half the time. http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103 http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph... Flexible hours will, of course, be more prevalent in jobs and industries where Output(hours) is a linear function. (Gender pay gaps are not intrinsically boring, but the inherent "turn of your mind because politics" makes it far less interesting.)

arjunnarayan 12y ago
Ties in well with Paul Graham's essay "Mind the Gap": It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? [6] These things don't scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it's concentrated in one individual. http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
- asgard1024 12y ago
  This Paul Graham's essay is hands down the best argument for libertarianism I have ever read. Yet, even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that), this doesn't entirely account for some 7 or so magnitudes of wealth and income disparities we see in the real world. The problem is, in modern society, almost nobody deserves to be paid for the work they do (I don't know about you, but my life would be exactly the same without Steve Jobs and random American athletes). We have automated almost everything, and the biggest chunk of productivity is due to capital (and innovations of our ancestors). So the question, how is this capital controlled and distributed, becomes central. (That's why many people here so oppose intellectual property - essentially the privatization of public information, which is analogous to land enclosures during 18th century.) So I think, if someone genuinely thinks that people should be paid based on value which they personally bring to society, he shoots himself to the foot. This value is probably too small for a living wage. That doesn't mean the improvements are not useful; it's just all the low hanging fruits have already been harvested.