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World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

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Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#231

Post by bryanrasmussen »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #13

When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two years. On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per…

for programming work I would say 20-25 hours a week on complicated things, and an extra 5 - 10 hours on simple things.

The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#232

Post by komali2 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #184
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Hanlon's razor applies here. As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof o…

>We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor. Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.

> Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.

I find this argument often used in defense of nationalism or protectionism, which is why it's interesting when the nationalists will turn around and argue against this same argument when you reveal its true nature restated, which is:

Labor, as predicted by Marx and other socialist philosophers, lost power with the rise of global capitalism. Just as Kropotkin wrote, capitalism goes country to country, forcing locals of each place to depend on it for goods as well as extracting from them cheap labor until they industrialize and become a part of the global middle class, the sustaining of which requires finding a new place to pillage for cheap labor.

As the transnational organizations doing this (say, Chiquita, or maybe BP) grow, as you said, their global political power increases, and not just because under this system, political power can be tied directly to capital volume.

But because people like Marx and Kropotkin wrote this and argued in favor of the worker taking back power, suddenly the nationalists are saying "wait wait no, we wanted to use this argument to get more nationalist government power, not more global working class power!"

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#233

Post by bryanrasmussen »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #205
Retric wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are. Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.

Funnily enough, I find myself the exact opposite. Give me a really hard engaging problem and I can work 16 hours and barely realize any time has passed, but spending even 1-2 hours on something rote saps my energy for the entire day. My tolerant is even lower for the particularly challenging combination of tasks that are both uninteresting but also tedious.

rote work is not what was talked about though, yes rote is boring and tiring, a hard engaging problem (engaging meaning something you are interested in I take it) can keep one occupied. This is what I describe as the artistic personality type in programming, doing great impressive work when interested, awful crap work when not interested.

but what about a hard problem that you do not make any progress on and you are sure what you did should solve it and what is wrong, why is it not working? You can't say it's uninteresting, but it is debilitating.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#234

Post by mns »

Vinnl wrote: post #28

It's the one thing I miss most from working for Dutch companies: being able to take a 20% pay cut and work 20% less. Theoretically, that should be a great deal for my employer: the extra rest, and just the way productive work is usually spread out across the week, means that my productivity definitely was not down 20% compared to now, so I was cheaper per hour. Yet even that culturally seems to be a hard sell in a ma…

In Germany, during the pandemic, the company went into "Kurzarbeit" for 6 months. We worked at 70%, but because of support and client issues, we couldn't just take one full day off and another half day, so we just worked around 5-6 hours a day.

Not only that the productivity didn't decrease, but after a while we were even more productive than before. Meetings were reduced to the minimum and depending on when you started and where you worked, when you finished you had almost a full day available for yourself. These were some of the best 6 months of my employee career.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#235

Post by andrei_says_ »

mrmincent wrote: post #3

I’ve gone down to 4 days, taking Fridays off to look after my son, and I certainly won’t be going back to 5 days until he’s in school. Looking after a toddler all day isn’t exactly a day off, but it is extremely rewarding, and something I’d recommend to any parent thinking about dropping down a day. It definitely has some downsides however, I’m the only one in the team that’s off that day, so there’s usually meetings…

You will remember the moments you spend with your son - and kids grow up fast.

The days at work - those no one will remember.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#236

Post by renewiltord »

np- wrote: post #155
Frost1x wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people). The more and more I see cases like this that exist, the more I feel it's yet more supporting evidence that the US is a failing democracy. We can point fingers and play responsibility games, we can claim its minority protec…

To be pedantic, the US has never been a democracy, it has always been a republic and it was built in to give land equal or more power than individuals. Though I don’t deny that it seems to be either in or approaching a failure mode (though perhaps the observant may notice it never worked as it was advertised even from Day 1, there was never really a success mode).

What exactly is pedantic about that? The US is a constitutional democracy and a republic. Just like India. Unlike the UK that's a constitutional democracy and a monarchy.

It's like saying something is "technically not a car, it's electric".

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#237

Post by komali2 »

vidarh wrote: post #208
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 year…

Stand-ups aren't really for devs, but for the team leads and PMs trying to track work. If they take more than ~5 min or so, people aren't prepared and that should be a red flag for team leads. That said, every day is often overkill, and most of the value can be gotten by keeping tickets up to date. But "ceremony" is often a tool to get people to keep things up to date by formalizing the expectation that it'll get pic…

I challenge PMs and leads to do a project, maybe just a small one, where you don't hold a group meeting even once over the course of the project.

I've led a 9 month project building an entire SaaS project this way. It was definitely hard work making sure my tickets were in good order, that i had a good design feedback loop with the designer (really just the CEO plopping components into figma), and that I had another feedback loop with the engineers (of which I was also one in this case) so we could accurately predict what would get done when.

The tools were relatively simple: figma for designs, linear for tickets, slack for messaging. This is across several time zones with differences up to 12 hours. I found that by using our tools well we were able to get a good product delivered in good time at good cost, with good quality of life for all involved.

I used to hate standups and think "well, I guess it's probably making someone else's job easier?" Sure, it was making the product manager's job of reporting what was happening to their boss easier. But turns out, maybe that can be supplanted by using your tools well. When will the xyz feature be done? Looks like middle of sprint based on estimates.

It seems so simple I don't really know if we just got lucky this one time or what, but this was across nearly a whole year and such a big project I kinda feel like we hit upon something with our method.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#238

Post by zdragnar »

vidarh wrote: post #208
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 year…

Stand-ups aren't really for devs, but for the team leads and PMs trying to track work. If they take more than ~5 min or so, people aren't prepared and that should be a red flag for team leads. That said, every day is often overkill, and most of the value can be gotten by keeping tickets up to date. But "ceremony" is often a tool to get people to keep things up to date by formalizing the expectation that it'll get pic…

We have JIRA etc for tracking work. That should always be the single source of truth; verbal communication isn't useful in the long run (someone might have missed standup, people forget, etc).

Even so, I've had daily stand-ups at the last several companies for years now. It is a consistently pointless exercise. To make it worse, several companies have also required posting our daily statuses in slack channels, just so the managers who were too busy to attend standup can see what people were going to say in standup, even though the exact same information is already in JIRA. The signal-to-noise ratio is way, way off.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#239

Post by renewiltord »

Frost1x wrote: post #89
standardUser wrote: post #50

I think it's worth considering that, in the US, the ultimate leap from 5 to 4 day work weeks would require a change in labor laws to mandate full-time status and overtime pay cutoff at 32 hours/week. Close to 60% of US workers are hourly. I can't predict all of the ramifications from that kind of change, but I have to imagine it would largely benefit workers. I wish we had a major political party that was at least wi…

>We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance, not some ideal or even well-reasoned number, let alone balanced in the interest of the overwhelming majority (working people). The more and more I see cases like this that exist, the more I feel it's yet more supporting evidence that the US is a failing democracy. We can point fingers and play responsibility games, we can claim its minority protec…

The US is a fully functioning representative democracy. People in small groups always overestimate the popularity of their cause.

Quite simply there are other people. And those people often have other opinions.

Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

#240

Post by TrackerFF »

cooperadymas wrote: post #51

Something I've never understood is why four days? Is it simply because it's an incremental improvement over the current five day week, a stopping point toward the next target, or is it the target?

To be honest, just being able to work half a day on Fridays is a huge improvement. I'm doing that currently (weekend starts at noon), and I get to do a lot of things with those 4 extra hours. Any chores of other things I'd do on Saturdays, I now do on Fridays after work.

I also used to work shifts for quite some time, and while I hated working nights/evenings, we "only" worked around 30 hours a week. So most of my weeks had odd days off here and there. Sometimes longer and more consecutive days. That is what I miss the most.

But having tried that, I can say that for me: Three consecutive days off > Two consecutive days off + one random day off here and there > Two consecutive days off.

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