10 ms·

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

108 points by ca98am79 12y ago

Shivetya 12y ago
so many people wanting stuff combined with far too many wanting someone else to pay for it.
cheepin 12y ago
Maybe the stuff we want to buy has gotten increasingly expensive. College, phone and internet, all on a stagnating wage.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Depends on the place. Phone & internet is not it, but college, rent, cars & health care are.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    Collage, rent, cars and healthcare take up an awful lot of the available income for most people, so if these are more expensive then that accounts for a lot.
  - stanmancan 12y ago
    I guess it does depend highly on lcoation. I live in Vancouver, Canada. For my fiancee and I, our cell phone bill comes to about $150/m and internet is $40. That alone is $1,200 a year. Cars are another expense that's gone up substantially over the last 20 years. We pay $140/m in insurance and at $1.40/L gas, at least $150/m in gas. That's $3,500 a year not including servicing (minimum $100 every ~3 months) or car payments ($280/m). All in, just owning a car costs us about $7,200 a year.
    - jarek 12y ago
      A year ago in Vancouver, I was paying $28 a month for cell, $30 for wired broadband internet, and $81 for a transit pass ($91 now). But if you want to spend a lot of money, cars and Canadian telecoms definitely make it easy.
      - stanmancan 12y ago
        Transit is alright in Vancouver, but not sufficient for a small family. I live in North Delta and work downtown Vancouver. I have a 7 year old daughter that needs to be dropped off at school, and picked up from her Grandma's in Surrey. I also coach her soccer team and play myself. For the individual transit alone is typically sufficient, but as soon as you have certain responsibilities a car quickly moves into the 'necessity' column.
        jarek 12y ago
        > but as soon as you have certain responsibilities True, kids in suburbs aren't cheap
- taber 12y ago
  Can somebody explain why this was downvoted? It may be based on false assumptions, but at least commenting moves the conversation forward.
  - ericras 12y ago
    Not really increasingly expensive. For example, a TV is actually a lot cheaper (not to mention better) than it used to be. We have/want more stuff then people in the past. Houses are larger. Families have more cars, more clothes, more toys, etc. Plus things that didn't exist like cell phones and internet access.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Exactly. The work week hasn't dropped because people have chosen (poorly, but that's just my opinion) to have more "stuff" than free/leisure time.
    - VLM 12y ago
      That's a macro vs micro problem. On a macro level it doesn't matter how many greenbacks or grams of gold or seashells or BTC are in play, the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house, and his extractable wealth by definition will become the median price. The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price. Either sell at that price or throw away profit or stuff warehouse with unsold merchandise. Its the same effect as .gov donating money for day care or housing or schooling has no direct effect on rates... all it does is make the item more expensive. I guess one way of putting it is you can't expect people to be richer if you do give all of them more money (aka inflation).
      - marcosdumay 12y ago
        > the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house That's somewhat true (but you can improve the quality of the median house, just can't improve size). > The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price. But that's not true. Buyers decide the median quality of TVs, not sellers. And TVs can be so cheap that everybody only buy the most expensive one, and still it makes no impact on their budget. Every physical good is exclusive to some degree, but that degree varies wildily.
spindritf 12y ago
People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the biggest impact. It's not all bad. Although not quite living up to the dreams from 20th century either. There's also something to be said about positional goods. A lot of people are driven by status and they work to be ahead of others. Elizabeth Warren believes that this explains why, despite technological progress, regular middle class family needs two incomes where one was enough a couple decades ago[3], they're competing for the same house, or school district. It doesn't explain everything but it's a factor. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989-why-rich-now-have-less-leisure-poor-nice-work-if-you-can-get-out http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989... [2] http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-confused-cyclical-recovery-monday-focus-august-18-2014/ http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-... [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents/dp/0465090907 http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Paren...
- sp332 12y ago
  It's not that the current situation is really bad, but things seem to have stopped improving. Productivity keeps going up but wages don't.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome.jpg http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.
    - spindritf 12y ago
      I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity. Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 percent in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s and then declined to 65 percent in the decade of the 1990s where it has again been from 2000 until the most recent quarter. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953
FD3SA 12y ago
Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the rich), for-profit prisons, etc. It is fascinating how powerful cultural and institutional momentum can be. I regularly run into very intelligent and rational Americans (particularly on HN!) who defend American institutions (e.g. healthcare) in spite of all the widespread data about them being massively inefficient. In the end, we reap what we sow. The profit motive brings great riches, but to a tiny few. The rest, sadly, often become the servants who enable the lifestyles of these outliers. Conversely, the outliers become the American Dream, seducing the average worker ever onwards with promises of riches and comfort just a few lucky breaks away.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  That and the absolute horrible response to the word Socialism which is equated directly with Communism by large parts of the electorate. The US system is very good at produce big winners at the expense of everyone else - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM astounded me even though I already knew the distribution was inequitable.
- wyager 12y ago
  Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures, private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world. You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and amazing.
  - adventured 12y ago
    I can only assume the parent is blaming the spiraling cost of education on Capitalism, when in fact it's the perpetually increasing federal loan guarantees spurring massive inflation that is the root of the cause. The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the industry in the late 1960s. No coincidence both industries began to skyrocket in cost at exactly the same time, shortly after Nixon ended the gold standard, and the Fed acquired free reign to generate immense inflation and aggressively tamper with interest rates (spurring the cheap consumer debt boom of the past 40 years). Everyone recognizes that healthcare and education became very expensive recently. Nobody seems to ask what changed in the last few decades to cause that. They act like Capitalism didn't exist in 1960.
spiritplumber 12y ago
People "need jobs" to be able to "afford" things, so we have a lot of people basically generating work for each other, as per Parkinson's Laws.
emo_tards_on_hn 12y ago
The guy next to me stole it. And some pens from my desk too. If you see him, tell him to please return them. Thanks.
sp332 12y ago
Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.
- Kiro 12y ago
  If everyone would receive X money then X would be the new 0.
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    ... No. That's not how those numbers are related. Consider a case where I give every US citizen $500/mo, and a software engineer makes an additional $5000/mo. Then 11 unemployed persons have the same spending power as a software engineer, which is markedly different from 0...
    - Kiro 12y ago
      Wouldn't it lead to massive inflation making those $500 practically worthless? The engineer's nominal salary would rise meaning you would need a magnitude more unemployed persons to have the same spending power.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    Only in a psychological sense, not in purchasing power.
    - Kiro 12y ago
      Why? Why wouldn't it lead to inflation?
      - seanflyon 12y ago
        It is not increasing the supply of money, so I don't see why it would cause inflation. Even if it did cause dramatic inflation $500 would become the new $250 not the new 0.
qwerta 12y ago
Four-hour workday is simple: do not marry and do not have a children.
- dijit 12y ago
  and work part-time?
  - RankingMember 12y ago
    and have no hobbies?
    - protonfish 12y ago
      And don't get sick.
      - goodcanadian 12y ago
        And where do I find the employer who will let me work only 4 hours a day?
    - soperj 12y ago
      hobbies cost time or money. If you have the time, why would you spend the money?
mrjj 12y ago
I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired. You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration. But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever. I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine. If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it. Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.
- dxbydt 12y ago
  > USA as no-vacation-nation As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.
- afarrell 12y ago
  How is documentation dumb work? Explaining technical concepts clearly is hard.
  - mrjj 12y ago
    Sorry, i don't want to injure any of the technical writers. They are the only guys keeping big projects from informational collapse. Moreover, they are some kind of project detectives, collecting clues about how this pile of * actually works. But if you are making something, you have to make some pieces of human-readable information about it and the poor quality is significantly better that no internal documentation at all. That the way developer or manager can help real technical writer. Also you can express your thoughts in short notes, schema drafts, checklists, documenting your mindflow. It's very usable and nearly impossible to delegate. You can steer at the lines and rectangles or lists, looking for missing points or removing redundant. Not hackworking, just harmonizing the details because it's odd to have time to polish shoes and no time to polish work.
RankingMember 12y ago
This could be done, but it'd need to be some kind of modern take on the old labor movement. People want 4 hour workdays, but they don't believe it'll change. Set up a site to allow people to specify their employer and essentially "opt-in", expressing their support for a 4-hour workday, but make it anonymous insofar as you'll only see a number of people at your workplace that share the same sentiment. There'd need to be some unique key to confirm that each person can only opt-in once. Compare the opt-in number to the number of employees reported on a company's tax paperwork, have the site get popular (whole project in itself unless there's good grassroots support), and suddenly you've got a nice obvious display of support within various companies for the 4-hour workday. Making it harder to ignore the will of the masses (or at least verifying that such a will exists) is a good start, I think.
programminggeek 12y ago
Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday. I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate. If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate. The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that lack of negotiating power is a problem. C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating (otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes). I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they just don't know how.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  It puzzles me how Americans don't want to discuss how much they make with coworkers.
  - programminggeek 12y ago
    Well, bosses have been known to threaten to fire workers if they are found to be discussing how much money they work. People act as if it would be impossible to work at a company where people could know what other people make. Yet, public school teachers have a pay schedule that is pretty cut and dry, government workers' salaries are public record, etc. Somehow people manage to work those jobs without any kind of mutiny due to freely available information. I'm sure there are other companies where this works out just fine. Mostly, companies take advantage of the information asymmetry to pay as little as they possibly have to. It works for them as long as people don't find out their getting screwed. If people find out, they negotiate better. Ultimately, that probably leads to people getting paid better or getting a better paying job. If companies just took care of the employees well to begin with, it wouldn't matter if people knew how much other people were getting paid. At the end of the day, it's a problem of greed, and that's an unsolvable problem as long as humans are involved.
avz 12y ago
> “If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful,” Benjamin Franklin assumed, “that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life.” True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town 240,000 miles away.
chris_va 12y ago
This is not well thought out: "If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn’t be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn’t be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints." The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce the number of jobs available significantly. Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.

108 points by ca98am79 12y ago

so many people wanting stuff combined with far too many wanting someone else to pay for it.

Maybe the stuff we want to buy has gotten increasingly expensive. College, phone and internet, all on a stagnating wage.

mahyarm 12y ago
Depends on the place. Phone & internet is not it, but college, rent, cars & health care are.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  Collage, rent, cars and healthcare take up an awful lot of the available income for most people, so if these are more expensive then that accounts for a lot.
- stanmancan 12y ago
  I guess it does depend highly on lcoation. I live in Vancouver, Canada. For my fiancee and I, our cell phone bill comes to about $150/m and internet is $40. That alone is $1,200 a year. Cars are another expense that's gone up substantially over the last 20 years. We pay $140/m in insurance and at $1.40/L gas, at least $150/m in gas. That's $3,500 a year not including servicing (minimum $100 every ~3 months) or car payments ($280/m). All in, just owning a car costs us about $7,200 a year.
  - jarek 12y ago
    A year ago in Vancouver, I was paying $28 a month for cell, $30 for wired broadband internet, and $81 for a transit pass ($91 now). But if you want to spend a lot of money, cars and Canadian telecoms definitely make it easy.
    - stanmancan 12y ago
      Transit is alright in Vancouver, but not sufficient for a small family. I live in North Delta and work downtown Vancouver. I have a 7 year old daughter that needs to be dropped off at school, and picked up from her Grandma's in Surrey. I also coach her soccer team and play myself. For the individual transit alone is typically sufficient, but as soon as you have certain responsibilities a car quickly moves into the 'necessity' column.
      - jarek 12y ago
        > but as soon as you have certain responsibilities True, kids in suburbs aren't cheap
taber 12y ago
Can somebody explain why this was downvoted? It may be based on false assumptions, but at least commenting moves the conversation forward.
- ericras 12y ago
  Not really increasingly expensive. For example, a TV is actually a lot cheaper (not to mention better) than it used to be. We have/want more stuff then people in the past. Houses are larger. Families have more cars, more clothes, more toys, etc. Plus things that didn't exist like cell phones and internet access.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Exactly. The work week hasn't dropped because people have chosen (poorly, but that's just my opinion) to have more "stuff" than free/leisure time.
  - VLM 12y ago
    That's a macro vs micro problem. On a macro level it doesn't matter how many greenbacks or grams of gold or seashells or BTC are in play, the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house, and his extractable wealth by definition will become the median price. The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price. Either sell at that price or throw away profit or stuff warehouse with unsold merchandise. Its the same effect as .gov donating money for day care or housing or schooling has no direct effect on rates... all it does is make the item more expensive. I guess one way of putting it is you can't expect people to be richer if you do give all of them more money (aka inflation).
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      > the median dude is going to, almost by definition, live in the median house That's somewhat true (but you can improve the quality of the median house, just can't improve size). > The median of whatever China decides to ship to us, will by definition, be the median quality TV and be sold at the median price. But that's not true. Buyers decide the median quality of TVs, not sellers. And TVs can be so cheap that everybody only buy the most expensive one, and still it makes no impact on their budget. Every physical good is exclusive to some degree, but that degree varies wildily.

spindritf 12y ago

People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the biggest impact. It's not all bad. Although not quite living up to the dreams from 20th century either. There's also something to be said about positional goods. A lot of people are driven by status and they work to be ahead of others. Elizabeth Warren believes that this explains why, despite technological progress, regular middle class family needs two incomes where one was enough a couple decades ago[3], they're competing for the same house, or school district. It doesn't explain everything but it's a factor. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989-why-rich-now-have-less-leisure-poor-nice-work-if-you-can-get-out http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21600989... [2] http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-confused-cyclical-recovery-monday-focus-august-18-2014/ http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-... [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents/dp/0465090907 http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Paren...

sp332 12y ago
It's not that the current situation is really bad, but things seem to have stopped improving. Productivity keeps going up but wages don't.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome.jpg http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity. Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 percent in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s and then declined to 65 percent in the decade of the 1990s where it has again been from 2000 until the most recent quarter. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953

FD3SA 12y ago

Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the rich), for-profit prisons, etc. It is fascinating how powerful cultural and institutional momentum can be. I regularly run into very intelligent and rational Americans (particularly on HN!) who defend American institutions (e.g. healthcare) in spite of all the widespread data about them being massively inefficient. In the end, we reap what we sow. The profit motive brings great riches, but to a tiny few. The rest, sadly, often become the servants who enable the lifestyles of these outliers. Conversely, the outliers become the American Dream, seducing the average worker ever onwards with promises of riches and comfort just a few lucky breaks away.

noir_lord 12y ago
That and the absolute horrible response to the word Socialism which is equated directly with Communism by large parts of the electorate. The US system is very good at produce big winners at the expense of everyone else - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM astounded me even though I already knew the distribution was inequitable.
wyager 12y ago
Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures, private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world. You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and amazing.
- adventured 12y ago
  I can only assume the parent is blaming the spiraling cost of education on Capitalism, when in fact it's the perpetually increasing federal loan guarantees spurring massive inflation that is the root of the cause. The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the industry in the late 1960s. No coincidence both industries began to skyrocket in cost at exactly the same time, shortly after Nixon ended the gold standard, and the Fed acquired free reign to generate immense inflation and aggressively tamper with interest rates (spurring the cheap consumer debt boom of the past 40 years). Everyone recognizes that healthcare and education became very expensive recently. Nobody seems to ask what changed in the last few decades to cause that. They act like Capitalism didn't exist in 1960.

spiritplumber 12y ago

People "need jobs" to be able to "afford" things, so we have a lot of people basically generating work for each other, as per Parkinson's Laws.

emo_tards_on_hn 12y ago

The guy next to me stole it. And some pens from my desk too. If you see him, tell him to please return them. Thanks.

sp332 12y ago

Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

Kiro 12y ago
If everyone would receive X money then X would be the new 0.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  ... No. That's not how those numbers are related. Consider a case where I give every US citizen $500/mo, and a software engineer makes an additional $5000/mo. Then 11 unemployed persons have the same spending power as a software engineer, which is markedly different from 0...
  - Kiro 12y ago
    Wouldn't it lead to massive inflation making those $500 practically worthless? The engineer's nominal salary would rise meaning you would need a magnitude more unemployed persons to have the same spending power.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Only in a psychological sense, not in purchasing power.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    Why? Why wouldn't it lead to inflation?
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      It is not increasing the supply of money, so I don't see why it would cause inflation. Even if it did cause dramatic inflation $500 would become the new $250 not the new 0.

qwerta 12y ago

Four-hour workday is simple: do not marry and do not have a children.

dijit 12y ago
and work part-time?
- RankingMember 12y ago
  and have no hobbies?
  - protonfish 12y ago
    And don't get sick.
    - goodcanadian 12y ago
      And where do I find the employer who will let me work only 4 hours a day?
  - soperj 12y ago
    hobbies cost time or money. If you have the time, why would you spend the money?

mrjj 12y ago

I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired. You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration. But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever. I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine. If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it. Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.

dxbydt 12y ago
> USA as no-vacation-nation As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.
afarrell 12y ago
How is documentation dumb work? Explaining technical concepts clearly is hard.
- mrjj 12y ago
  Sorry, i don't want to injure any of the technical writers. They are the only guys keeping big projects from informational collapse. Moreover, they are some kind of project detectives, collecting clues about how this pile of * actually works. But if you are making something, you have to make some pieces of human-readable information about it and the poor quality is significantly better that no internal documentation at all. That the way developer or manager can help real technical writer. Also you can express your thoughts in short notes, schema drafts, checklists, documenting your mindflow. It's very usable and nearly impossible to delegate. You can steer at the lines and rectangles or lists, looking for missing points or removing redundant. Not hackworking, just harmonizing the details because it's odd to have time to polish shoes and no time to polish work.

RankingMember 12y ago

This could be done, but it'd need to be some kind of modern take on the old labor movement. People want 4 hour workdays, but they don't believe it'll change. Set up a site to allow people to specify their employer and essentially "opt-in", expressing their support for a 4-hour workday, but make it anonymous insofar as you'll only see a number of people at your workplace that share the same sentiment. There'd need to be some unique key to confirm that each person can only opt-in once. Compare the opt-in number to the number of employees reported on a company's tax paperwork, have the site get popular (whole project in itself unless there's good grassroots support), and suddenly you've got a nice obvious display of support within various companies for the 4-hour workday. Making it harder to ignore the will of the masses (or at least verifying that such a will exists) is a good start, I think.

programminggeek 12y ago

Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday. I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate. If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate. The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that lack of negotiating power is a problem. C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating (otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes). I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they just don't know how.

spiritplumber 12y ago
It puzzles me how Americans don't want to discuss how much they make with coworkers.
- programminggeek 12y ago
  Well, bosses have been known to threaten to fire workers if they are found to be discussing how much money they work. People act as if it would be impossible to work at a company where people could know what other people make. Yet, public school teachers have a pay schedule that is pretty cut and dry, government workers' salaries are public record, etc. Somehow people manage to work those jobs without any kind of mutiny due to freely available information. I'm sure there are other companies where this works out just fine. Mostly, companies take advantage of the information asymmetry to pay as little as they possibly have to. It works for them as long as people don't find out their getting screwed. If people find out, they negotiate better. Ultimately, that probably leads to people getting paid better or getting a better paying job. If companies just took care of the employees well to begin with, it wouldn't matter if people knew how much other people were getting paid. At the end of the day, it's a problem of greed, and that's an unsolvable problem as long as humans are involved.

avz 12y ago

> “If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful,” Benjamin Franklin assumed, “that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life.” True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town 240,000 miles away.

chris_va 12y ago

This is not well thought out: "If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn’t be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn’t be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints." The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce the number of jobs available significantly. Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.