491–500 of 518 posts
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College is not job training. I'm not sure why this misconception is so widespread. I have a degree but my employers do pay for relevant training for my job. It's not like the industry stopped evolving 10 years ago.
College is not job training and yet it's training that most jobs require. Hmmmmm....sounds like BS.
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> Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that. It depends. In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, C…
That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them. And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle. If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your e…
For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off.
But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.
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I can work 55 hours a week in perpetuity as a founder, with the exception of four off grid, week long vacations a year. Even two weeks over 60 hours (e.g. fundraising across timezones) and I rapidly lose it.
But is your overall productivity higher with 55 hours than it would be with less hours? It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity. Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over mu…
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No, there are jobs where you do rote things on demand or at particular intervals with no fatigue at 40 hours per week. Examples from my own employment experience: - front desk clerk at a hotel - fuel pump operator Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.
Most of these customer facing jobs will be abandoned or optimised away in the next few decades. Front desk work could be done away with mostly by electronic systems (most of the time when I "check in" it's just picking up a ready made room card as I checked in online). You could even centralise the "talking to a human" part in a call center operating a number of hotels, who delegate to staff on the premises (house ke…
Nope. See Oregon and NJ, unless you don’t these American states to be part of these “Western countries”.
In general, don’t respond to examples of jobs that actually exist now with a hypothetical world where they don’t exist to state something about the current world.
Obviously being facetious but the Japanese work ethic expectations are terrifying
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Some notably low-staffed places in Japan are Yoshinoya and Sukiyaki (beef bowel fast food, often 24/7). It seems there usually just one person working there at a time.
By low-staffed, do you mean that you had to wait long time to get your order? These places are highly automated so they don't need as many staff, sure there's few people working there but usually more than enough for serving the orders that come through in just few minutes.
I 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…
I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little d…
If you look around there's plenty of such a "pointless" jobs. The same with people steering the traffic at the parking lot entrances/exits at any bigger entertainment or shopping center. Sometimes with almost no pedestrians around and yet those people are standing there in sun or rain alike. Or people who's only job is to smile and open doors for you, less common, but happens as well.
To be honest, though, as a "consumer" of such jobs (pedestrian in this case) I do feel they took an extra mile to make it as safe and comfortable for me as possible. And I do feel better about it.
It may look pointless at the surface, but I think those jobs are extremely important for society at large.
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The alternative is to pay people for doing nothing, like many EU countries do. In the end it's not cheaper.
There are similar measures in many EU countries. For example hiring unemployed people to help kids pass particularly busy streets near primary schools. https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/6c/83/5b7d5e3b2b9de_p.jpg?153...
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I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little d…
Some notably low-staffed places in Japan are Yoshinoya and Sukiyaki (beef bowel fast food, often 24/7). It seems there usually just one person working there at a time.
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> The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the govern…
> Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here ... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace. I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected unti…