Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
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Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
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Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#2On a phone so I can't really crunch the raw data, but looking at that chart example, Is the difference between 48 hours and 60 statistically significant?
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#3I think we should be looking at efficiency. If we can find a way to maximize the tradeoff between productivity and hours worked it would greatly benefit employers and employees.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#4Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#5I think we should be looking at efficiency. If we can find a way to maximize the tradeoff between productivity and hours worked it would greatly benefit employers and employees.
i think the author did a pretty good job at looking at the tradeoffs.
in a lot of ways, some businesses are already trying to take advantage of both options by using a mix of contractors/consultants and full time employees.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#6I think we should be looking at efficiency. If we can find a way to maximize the tradeoff between productivity and hours worked it would greatly benefit employers and employees.
that would be great, but many employers would just use that as a reason to pay employees less, or not give them benefits.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#7A bit surprised not to see a reference to Henry Ford. I thought he was the father of the 40 hour work week? He did include in his thinking the idea that more leisure time would allow workers more time to enjoy his cars, but IIRC the basis of the change was not social, but productivity, and based on his own studies.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#8I think the real problem is presentialism – people would likely contribute more if they are provided with the flexibility of working according to their body rhythms. Each human peaks at different hours of the day. And being in the knowledge economy, it makes more sense to access these spikes of output by providing flexibility.
40 or 50 or 60 hours, i believe that if we could just eliminate the presentialism from our work life, build more trust with each other about being honest with our work – i think the whole research into how many hours we need to work will not even pop up. Everyone would be happy contributing their share of work in return for a paycheck.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#9TL;DR: you can get more done if you work 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a week, but the work done in that extra 20 hours might be a small fraction of what gets done in 20 hours during a 40 hour week.
This is self-evidently true for many jobs. E.g., if you pick apples for 40 hours, then even if you only pick one apple per hour after that, you will still pick more apples working 50 hours than 40.
We software developers, though, have an additional consideration: creating software bugs which can (easily) push the productivity of a given period of time into the negative, sometimes deeply.
In my apple-picker example above, this would be like the tired picker driving the loaded apple truck off a cliff, destroying all the apples picked in the first 59 hours of the 60 hour work week (along with the expensive truck).
That example is contrived and unconvincing for the apple picker case, though; nobody makes their tired apple pickers drive the apple trucks back via treacherous mountain roads after a hard day of work.
That's not the case for software development, however; looking at my own 20+ years of professional software development through the lens of an extremely rigorous scientific n=1 anecdatal analysis (which undoubtedly thrills the OP hehe), in my own career probably 75% of the negative productivity caused by bugs I've created was the direct result of code I wrote while trying to work more hours than I should.
I suspect this holds true for other programmers as well.
Re: Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week
#10A bit surprised not to see a reference to Henry Ford. I thought he was the father of the 40 hour work week? He did include in his thinking the idea that more leisure time would allow workers more time to enjoy his cars, but IIRC the basis of the change was not social, but productivity, and based on his own studies.
The 40-hour workweek was conceived of and fought for by many socialists and labor activists over many years. What can be said for Ford is that they instituted it without being forced to (by strike or law), but it was nearly 50 years after it had been instituted for federal employees (and 2 years after it was a part of FDR's platform.)