Cutting your salary by 40%

And if it's not been rigorously tested, then there doesn't seem to be any strong case to assume that the ideal number for office work is higher, rather than lower, than 40.

I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.

I dunno. The direct translation of "salaried" to Finnish is "kuukausipalkallinen" and/or "palkallinen" (which is what it says in my current contract). Which basically means monthly paid or just paid. This is the "default" way of getting paid for your work. We have separate system of hourly paid called "tuntipalkallinen" (again a direct translations tunti==hour and palkallinen==paid)

I think this comes down to the employment law here in Finland. Working more then 40 hours a week is basically illegal unless you get compensated for those extra hours. There are some exceptions:

* owners (duh...) and their family members (family businesses)

* C level employees

* work you do at home wholly (if your company has a office the employee visits a couple times a year is enough for you to not be included in this)

* churches religious employees (priests etc. not the janitor)

* military/border control has their own special way of doing it

* some jobs have 120 hours every 3 weeks way of counting this

As a side note:

Maybe we just don't have the same concept as "salaried" in our language at all (at least I can't come up with one). Closest would be "urakkapalkka" which is basically contract work (as in I will build you this website that you want for X euros. Doesn't matter if it takes 1 hour or 100 hours because we already agreed on the price). No you are not allowed to abuse the contract work way of doing it by having "he will work for our company every week day for as long as we cancel this for as much time as it takes to get shit done"

Only legal way that I know of for getting around this is starting your own one man company and being a consultant. But then it is a contract between 2 companies and a whole lot of protections in both directions go away. Also you most likely need a lawyer to get a "good" contract and handle all the taxes, pension, etc by yourself (this is pretty much automated here in Finland for normal employees).

There are many reasons why one can't believe a person's own reasoning for why they've succeeded where others haven't.

There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press.

People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week.

It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare.

There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.

How did you determine that 40 hours is optimal? Why not 30? Or 50?

So the point of salaries is to not have to pay overtime? No wonder everyone is becoming a contractor.