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There is a frequent pattern which concerns me of primarily justifying the desire for reduced work hours in terms of the alleged increase in productivity this wi

• awkward 12y ago
  I have to wonder if the mechanism here that leads people report increased productivity isn't being better rested, its that they have set clear boundaries on what they will do and what is realistic, push back accordingly, and are judged by fairer standards. On the other hand, treating your free time as a potentially infinite bank of extra time leads to overpromising and giving the perception of underdelivery, no matter how much total work gets done.
• jsprogrammer 12y ago
  You can't look at yourself solely as an individual (unless you only depend on yourself), but have to look at yourself in the larger picture of our ecosystem. If your 'shorter-work-hours' results in everyone else needing to put in 'longer-work-hours' to satisfy global needs and/or demands, then there is an argument that you are a free-rider. Instead, the totality of 'work-hours' needs to be examined in detail and we need to think about whether the distribution is 'fair' and how we can reduce 'work-hours' across the board, for all individuals.
  • zaccus 12y ago
    Bullshit. Everyone else doesn't "need" to put in longer hours so I can have a reasonable schedule, and it's in no way my fault if they decide to do that. I'm not a "free-rider". If my employer isn't satisfied with what I can do in a 40-hour week, then they shouldn't be paying me. I will absolutely not work 60-hour weeks on a regular basis. If my individual interests clash with those of the "ecosystem", then my individual interests take precedence. If I don't look out for my work-life balance and overall happiness, then who will?
    • jsprogrammer 12y ago
      You examine yourself in a vacuum. Does your food come free? Does your water? At the current time, someone must do some work in order for you to remain living. Some of those people who do that work are not afforded the work-life balance others are able to achieve. Can you eat your employer's bank credits?
      • c22 12y ago
        Considering the vast majority of humans are doing "work" that doesn't help anyone get food or water I think this argument is a little specious. Who defines the necessary attributes of this environment?
        • jsprogrammer 12y ago
          I'm not sure that(vast majority)'s accurate. I'd guess many people go to a food distribution center daily, or at least weekly, to select and transport food for their family and friends. Many work in the food and beverage service industry, either serving or preparing food for consumption. Many are employed by manufactured foods factories. Transport trucks that go from production sites to distribution and/or manufacturing centers don't drive themselves yet. There are also those who actually work on raw production.
          • abarron 12y ago
            Most of the jobs you're listing here are hourly jobs with 40 hour workweeks; or they're at least paid overtime. The salaried workers doing 60-70 hour weeks every week are not doing anything related to providing food or beverages. They're programmers, advertisers, sales, lawyers, etc. Not exactly life giving jobs. I'm sure some Coca Cola, Nabisco, and McDonalds employees work 60+ hour weeks but they're not serving food, they're maximizing profits for the company. We could all be well fed and hydrated without a single person working 60+ hours a week.
            • jsprogrammer 12y ago
  • steamy 12y ago
    Your work-centric worldview and live-to-work attitude are at best shortsighted and bland. I suggest that you broaden your horizon and look at the bigger picture and derive meaning of your life away from work and career because as you're aging, these matters become more and more less relevant and less enticing.
    • jsprogrammer 12y ago
      Your simplistic worldview ignores facts: humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive. Those things don't get to your body for free [as in 'effort']. At least, not on the scale that humans are currently occupying the planet. To remain at our current level requires tremendous physical labor and organization of process just to deliver the required nutrients to every person, every day (and we still fail to achieve 100% distribution). There is a base level of effort required to sustain our current state. To believe otherwise is foolish delusion. If you supply your own nutrients and use no product of another, you may exempt yourself from the previous analysis. Otherwise, I suggest we figure out how to achieve the above with as little 'work-hours' as possible.
      • steamy 12y ago
        humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive So, are you shooting for a subsistence income level for ALL humans? I don't know why we should work for 60 hrs/w with no OT compensation to feed the planet when the 1% of Earth's population are hoarding over 35% of global wealth if not more. Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death?
        • jsprogrammer 12y ago
          You're spinning strawmen. When did I claim any of that? 'Wealth', in the context you speak of it, is an illusion. Your question: >Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death? Is non-sensical. A person cannot eat 'wealth', just as one of the other responders cannot eat his employer's bank credits.
  • zethraeus 12y ago
    No, you as an individual don't 'need' to do that. What does 'need' even mean? Require to survive? Making societally optimal decisions is a crazy burden to try to put on a single person. As single entities we don't have near the amount of information or power required to act on that impetus with any weight. Society as a whole needs to establish norms, and perhaps regulations, to ensure it doesn't fall apart. Individuals should consider those norms in their decisions (and fight to make them better). But slapping someone with the responsibility to be a single person acting alone to maximize happiness for their collective is asking them to be impotently act on shoddy heuristics.
  • 6d0debc071 12y ago
    How will my working 60 hours on something improve the work life balance of people in extremely poor bargaining positions? It seems to me it might even make their bargaining position worse. There is less need for people who can accomplish the task the more any given individual can accomplish on their own and the more people there are who can accomplish that task. Monopolising the potential pool of work is a bad thing just to get more money that I don't need. Yes, let someone else do more work. Perhaps someone who wouldn't have chance to work otherwise. And in my free time maybe I'll spend some of that money I make, and that will create even more jobs - providing people in other parts of society with a better bargaining position as well as those who share in the pool of work; the pool of mutually beneficial need; that I enjoy.... The idea that if I work 60 hours at some esoteric piece of technology the work life balance of people who don't have the leverage to achieve a comparably small working week will get better strikes me as nuts. There's no plausible mechanism connecting the two being shown.
  • twoquestions 12y ago
    You're making the bad assumption that working less hours gets less things done. The author made it clear that he gets more done while working less hours, so it follows that people burning the midnight oil for social cred are the real leeches, rather than the people who prioritize better. Also, cranking away on Rails sites isn't going to feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty, by and large. Those are social problems of bad distribution, not lack of productivity.
• steamy 12y ago
  Don't you know that you're working for the capitalists to maximize their fortunes and appropriate the surplus value of your work till the last drop in your blood?
• jewel 12y ago
  This is why I've negotiated for hourly pay at all of the jobs I've had so far. I feel like this is the most fair way to pay programmers. There is always an infinite list of work to do, so there's always pressure to work more hours. It doesn't matter if I work less hours in a given week, since my employer just pays me less. Also as an added benefit I also get time-and-a-half if I go over 40 hours. The downside is that I have to punch a time card, clocking out for lunch and for breaks. That doesn't bother me, but it'd be a big adjustment for salaried employees. I've been working this way for the past ten years and it's fantastic from a work-life balance perspective. I worked an average of 34 hours per week last year.
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    Downside to this - Do you think about work on your off hours? Do you go read a tutorial on some new tech in the evening? You are then doing "unpaid" training... whereas if you are on salary, you can at least make some claim that the training and thinking you do off the clock is still working...
    • Karunamon 12y ago
      This implies that a programmer has zero desire to program on their own time - and anecdotally, I don't know a single person like that. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't know a single person in the tech field, period, that treats it the same way they'd treat flipping burgers. Every single person has a (cliché alert) passion for it that extends outside the workday.
      • Raphmedia 12y ago
        Programmer here. I have zero desire to program on my own time. Tried it. Felt like bringing work home. That being said, I avoid my computer like the plague these days. After spending all day sitting on a computer, the last thing I want to do when I get home is to sit and work on another computer.
        • saiya-jin 12y ago
• ffn 12y ago
  You're absolutely right, but I'd argue that, by switching to a more balanced life-style, you're still optimizing your life... except instead of optimizing for money-earned by your company, you're maximizing for personal health and satisfaction. And really it's this question of "what are we optimizing for?" (aka "what's do I want to do in my life?") that explains why we buy into the culture of overwork. As in, if your goal in life is to maximize company and personal profit per time, then by all means, committing to an over kill culture will get you there. If you want to party hard (and I mean hard as in hookers and cocaine in a pent house, not a weekend camping trip to Yosemite or whatever), you will need to work hard. On the other hand, if your goal in life is to live long and healthy and or get really good at your craft, then it makes sense to limit your daily hours and be patient. If you don't know what your life goals are (and I imagine a lot of young folks are in this category), then you'll readily buy into whatever life-goals are presented to you by whoever person has the most social influence. And the young guys who flaunt the tons of money they have made in a short amount of time through overworking really hard influence us a lot more than the old guys who intentionally don't mention the large sum of money they've made working slowly over time. So we model our lives after those fast burners, and try to replicate their success despite having a different set of physical resources to work with. This (lack thereof) personal life strategy will work for a tiny population of the folks who adopt it, and having known only success, they will have some level of contempt for the large majority who couldn't do it. As for the large majority who fail, they'll either figure out how to be patient and lead a balanced life (like the writer of this blog), or wind up with some sort of kidney disease in their 30s. And that's really just life when you throw out all the frivolous junk of "optimized load times", "brand adherence", "platform agnosticism", "shipping deadlines", etc., it is about finding out what for yourself what you can and what you're going to optimize for in your short several decades on this relatively eternal planet.