They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?
Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
11–20 of 211 posts
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#12I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted. I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.
And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well. IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a we…
When I was in sales/marketing, it was all about hitting your quota. If you were good, your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month. It gave the higher performers the leeway to work when they wanted to, and also give an incentive to the average sales people to up their game to be able to do the same.
As a developer, a majority of the companies I worked at there was no incentive to go above and beyond, even at the end of the year in terms of bonuses. Sure, the guy that was burning himself out for that extra 1% yearly raise usually got it, but it never made any sense to me to work that hard for a few more pennies over the year.
Now in my 30's, my attitude is to get my stuff done and stay off my managers radar. My sanity and work/life balance is too important at this point in my life.
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#13I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?
This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication. I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.
> French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours.
Why?
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#14the costs outweigh the benefits
Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess.
Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts.
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#15I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?
This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication. I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.
Leaving at 5pm is the norm in Germany only in very particular circumstances. Most people I know are stuck until 18:30 or so.
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#16I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?
In theory, it is 7 hours a day (for 35 hours a week contracts).
In reality, most office workers are pulling unpaid extra hours.
It's also possible to get 38.5 or 40 hours contracts, where you would get extra holidays to compensate (over a year).
I've worked as a programmer in France, Canada and England. In my experience France and England are pretty much the same in terms of work-time (8 hours/day, 5 week holiday), Canada is behind by lack of holiday (8 hours/day, generally 3 weeks holiday)
Edit: bare in mind this is based on my experience and will presumably be very different depending on the employer.
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#17If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with [4,6,8] working hours?
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#18I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted. I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.
And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well. IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a we…
So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:
how do I know how much work is enough?
If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.
But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work.
When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.
But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.
I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance.
This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#19Wow. The sad state of journalism... and of critique from readers at this site.
Obviously bumping salaries by 1/4 is not reasonable.
In order for costs not to outweigh benefits that clinic would need to be some kind of utopia...
Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication. I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.
Leaving at 5pm is the norm in Germany only in very particular circumstances. Most people I know are stuck until 18:30 or so.
Interesting. I worked for a multinational, we had a (brilliant) German intern who worked in our FR headquarters, very long hours. Then she moved back to Germany in a local division, where she was always the last one closing the lights, by a long shot. It might be the effect of headquarter vs local company, perhaps, but 5pm is what I saw in most plants in Germany.