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Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
451–460 of 518 posts
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#452Why does the government need to be involved if employers actually get better productivity in the first place? Let employers experiment by themselves and see what works best. Another typical example of top-to-bottom leadership in Japan.
If the government doesn't make laws that define broad principles, capitalism will eat you alive. Employers are greedy and evil. Their focus is profit maximization. Not employee well being. Given the chance, do you really think employers will even give vacation days to employees? No way. They will want you to work 24/7 if the govt. is ok with it.
ford & Westinghouse disagree with you, but that is possible only in non-feudalistic sectors and benevolent masters
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, it's illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. [0] [0] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/74549/why-cant-you-pump-...
From NJ, wouldn't change it. No need to get out of your car and deal with a dirty pump. You can also get out to go in the store while they fill your tank, or some smaller places you can buy stuff right from the attendant. Gas doesn't cost any extra because of it either. We used to have some of the cheapest gas in the country before a recent tax hike. Basically a free service, no tipping either. One downside is that i…
You pay for that service whether you realize it or not.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#454Big mistake. It was the 5-6 day week that built modern Japan. A lot of people are talking about cutting back on days everywhere. But now, more than ever, is when we need to be working harder to get back to where we were before. (Of course, my attitude to these things is shaped by being a business owner -- not an employee. So take with that point of view)
human labour is becoming less and less relevant in production of goods & services, society must find a balance between an everdominant capital and diminuishing labour value (as a whole), keeping busy all hours in bullshit jobs is not the same as 50 years ago (from a global perspective)
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#455It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, g…
We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…
This sounds great. I don't want to have to pretend to care about my company or it's "culture". I just want to do some work and get paid for it.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don’t understand this comment. At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over ema…
You pay for employee training. You don’t pay for contractor training.
What training? I had to pay for my own college degree, my employer didn't pay for that, but they do require it.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh. Thanks, never thought about it that way. Sarcasm aside yes: I’m not gonna keep working in the US for that specific reason.
I could be wrong, but it seems that there's no great shortage of companies offering 4+ weeks of PTO per year in the US. Or are you expecting more vacation than that? (Or are perhaps otherwise constrained as to the choice of employers?)
I've got 4 weeks paid vacation. It really doesn't feel like much. That's only 1/13th of your weeks being work-free per year. I personally would like more. I think something like a 20-25 hour workweek plus 8-12 weeks of vacation would be good enough that I would stay in the workforce long term. As it stands today, it seems more feasible to continue working full time, hit FI in a few years and retire early rather than find such a good work-life balance.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#458I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…
We post scarcity now.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society. First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT ev…
I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience. I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't…
My main thesis is that this is almost purely a population problem. The developed world can give up all their creature comforts and it would still not nearly be enough to even put a dent in anything.
We are already dealing with famine and disease in many places of the world. Independent of whether or not this is climate caused, we can't solve it without expending large resources and using the industrial might that we've built.
The conundrum is that the place with massive population growth aren't really the places with the resources to implement green energy solutions. Coal is easier, coal is cheaper. Yes, the developed world's love of meat is a major source of deforestation, but so is the need to grow the food to feed 10 billion people.
Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage. This is one of the reasons I am not planning to have kids, when I die the relative population to my existence drops by one. Even if my kid rode their bike their whole life, lived in a climate friendly passive heating/cooling house and ate locally sourced food, their existence would produce more climate gasses than my ICE could ever dream of producing.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all "weekends" have to be at the end of the week. You can have a weekend Wednesday and be able to recharge every 2 days without having to wait for 4 full days before your next weekend.
This is the way. I did this for a few months to burn through some of my leave budget. It was great Wednesday became my chores day. Get the house in order, go to the bank whatever. Then the weekend was entirely spent on luxury and entertainment. My overall output was reasonably similar to that of a 5 day week because I came at work with a waay better attitude. It also made it easier to plan 2 days of work instead of 5…
I get what you are saying.
Just want to point out that Ideally you shouldn't feel the need to think about work on either of your free days. Wednesday or weekend.