The anti crunch hours license • Hacker News Board

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#81

Post by rb808 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #69

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. With most of "us" being some kind of a software engineer, I'm sincerely curious: was 80-hours workweek ever a mandatory thing for an engineer (teacher, doctor)?

A quick search for “doctor work week” is returning numbers that start around 50 and go up to 108 for an emergency room surgeon. There is a horrible cultural expectation of crazy amounts of overwork in the US hospital world.

Pretty much every hospital globally.

Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#82

Post by vkou » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #81

egypturnash wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick search for “doctor work week” is returning numbers that start around 50 and go up to 108 for an emergency room surgeon. There is a horrible cultural expectation of crazy amounts of overwork in the US hospital world.

Pretty much every hospital globally. Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.

There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you.

However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, checklists are a good idea during surgeries.

If someone came up with a process improvement that made patient handoff better, many doctors would resist it out of principle, vanity, or plain-old "I was hazed with 90 hr/week residency, so should every new doctor."

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#83

Post by HenryBemis » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

learnstats2 wrote: post #47

I-Iuw wrote: post #10

Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. The org on GitHub that developed this license is called 996ICU ( https://996.icu/#/en_US ). It is a (very large) group of Chinese developers that are upset with the common practice of working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Please be mindful of the fact that lots of developers around the world work under genuinely awful conditions, and that yo…

Why would it not be legally binding?

Ok let me answer that..

Which country is going to vote a LAW that writes: nobody works more than 45 hours/week?

The next day healthcare will collapse. Big corporations will lobby VERY hard against that.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#84

Post by HenryBemis » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #51

I-Iuw wrote: post #10

Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. The org on GitHub that developed this license is called 996ICU ( https://996.icu/#/en_US ). It is a (very large) group of Chinese developers that are upset with the common practice of working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Please be mindful of the fact that lots of developers around the world work under genuinely awful conditions, and that yo…

> your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. You have no proof of this. The (x times y) work week for manual labourers was earned by a long history of labour activism. Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.

http://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#85

Post by Jcampuzano2 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

forinti wrote: post #38

TheCoreh wrote: post #18

I live in Brazil. Under Brazilian labor laws, a work week is defined as 44 hours, with each work day having up to 8 hours. So you just excluded companies that have ever had anyone do more than one hour of (paid) overtime any week. Which is basically every company in my country, considering (occasional, paid) overtime is normal and predicted in the relevant laws. Here, 12 hour shifts with 36 hour rest periods is also…

It's a bit worse than it seems, because lunch breaks are not included, so whereas an American would call his 9-to-5 job a 40 hour work week, it would be equivalent to a 35 hour Brazilian work week. A Brazilian work day is usually 8h30 to 18h18 so that 44h will fit into 5 days. You can see how adding a commute of at least and hour (could easily be 2h or 3h in São Paulo or Rio) will simply eat up your whole day. I thin…

I don't know, I think 9 to 6 has been becoming more of the norm here as well. All the places I have worked so far (maybe I've been unlucky) have expected more of a 9 to 6 (give or take an hour shift in either direction) than a 9 to 5 cadence.

Also, I don't know many people who work a strict 9 to 5 in office jobs, many take work home with them or are expected to always be available even on weekends should something come up. Not saying this is good, but I don't think strict 9-5 is the norm anymore.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#86

Post by geofft » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #80

geofft wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 'Kaveren isn't saying "You don't know why these people are working 10 hours consecutively" but rather "You don't know why every person who works 10 hours consecutively is doing so." There is certainly a problem with the culture of mainland Chinese tech work (as well as with game dev work), but a license that legally bans use from any company that ever asks anyone to work more than a 10-hour day has too much s…

>and is thus a license that perfectly reasonable employers will avoid There are reasons a reasonable employer might adopt this. Maybe they never require employees to work more than 40 hour weeks, so they can advertise they follow this strict license to give them an advantage in hiring employees who want some guarantee they won't have to work overtime. Maybe they want to "open source" something to have the community c…

Are there employers that never require employees to work more than 40 hour weeks? Ever? Even "implicitly"? Even if at 5:58 PM the elevator breaks and you can't leave until 6:01 PM? At the risk of losing what you say is a really important library forever? It seems too risky.

And even if there is one employer that is willing to make that guarantee, what library is important enough that it must be used and cannot be reimplemented, even given the combined resources of every employer not willing to make that guarantee?

If a lone developer wants to write software, great, but again it's not an open source license and they should have no expectation of others contributing to it, the way they would for open source. There's been lots of freeware / shareware in the world. It's mostly been out-competed by actual open source.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#87

Post by rb808 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #82

rb808 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every hospital globally. Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.

There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you. However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, check…

Move fast break things doesn't work so well with medicine though. I heard vets are much more high tech because they wont get sued, probably true.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#88

Post by moosey » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #51

I-Iuw wrote: post #10

Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. The org on GitHub that developed this license is called 996ICU ( https://996.icu/#/en_US ). It is a (very large) group of Chinese developers that are upset with the common practice of working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Please be mindful of the fact that lots of developers around the world work under genuinely awful conditions, and that yo…

> your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. You have no proof of this. The (x times y) work week for manual labourers was earned by a long history of labour activism. Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.

I would love to have examples of good working conditions being arrived at naturally. Given that there are many programmers of various talent levels throughout the industry I have noted a number of dark patterns in programming work: long hours, pay that refuses to follow value of work (Apple makes 400k profit per employee), reduction in workspace quality, etc.

We can all pretend that we have more economic power than our highly paid blue collar peers that worked in highly unionized work forces in the past, but the programmers that make the kind of money for that to be true are very rare. Nearly 30 years ago my father made 70k as a union welder. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to match that salary street inflation, and the world is more expensive: education and health care could eat us alive at any moment.

I don't know how much of our effort the capital owning class needs to strip from us before we take advantage of the massive productive capacities we have before we make it fair again, but I assure you, it will be organized, not natural.

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#89

Post by geofft » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #79

geofft wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People"? Most people I know do actually mean the OSD. Most of my friends do, and certainly all my employers that have had open-source processes do—I can't necessarily use that process to release code to a weird non-OSD-compliant license just because the source is visible under some conditions. (Also, "people" use the word "copyright" when they mean "trademark", and post "No copyright intended" on their YouTube video…

You are assuming they do, but they likely don't. Counter example for this is SQLite. Almost everyone considers it open source, presumably even you. Lots of projects that embed it are considered open source. SQLite, however, is not OSI open source and none of the projects that embed it can be OSI open source either. And it's ok, because people generally don't think of open source as something with OSI approved license…

What part of the Open Source Definition https://opensource.org/osd-annotated do SQLite's redistribution terms violate?

Why is it the case that projects that embed SQLite cannot be open source in the OSI sense? (I don't think this is true.)

Re: The anti crunch hours license

#90

Post by rqs » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #64

rqs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there are other venues for labour activism than changing the license The thing is, this kind of online protest is the safest for both initiators and participants. If by "other venues for labour activism" you mean go to the street, you're basically risk sending people to jail (And after the thing, nobody want to risk to get milled down by tanks). Also, did you know that 996 is by law illegal in China? You can te…

> The thing is, this kind of online protest is the safest for both initiators and participants. If by "other venues for labour activism" you mean go to the street, you're basically risk sending people to jail (And after the thing, nobody want to risk to get milled down by tanks). Why will the government avoid to use repressive measures against this? Otherwise they don't do their job of totalitarian government well en…

> Why will the government avoid to use repressive measures against this?

This is how the labor law been structured in China. In many cases you need to file the case by yourself in order to get it investigated.

> So technically, the license isn't needed.

> If you can't get the law enforced, how will you be able to enforce the license

I don't think you've understood the situation. In China, we play it safe.

You can get administration involved, but you will likely need to file the case by yourself, which may cause you to get fired. Now, if a third-party can help you by putting some pressure on your company, then both of you will be safe.

The license adds another reason to convince your boss to not implement 996.