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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

#241

Post by dunefox »

lettergram wrote: post #172
mobiledev2014 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s baffling. Nobody should have to work 60 hours a week and be happy about it, doesn’t matter when the hours are

Lol for almost all human history working all a day was the norm. I don’t necessarily have to do that much work, but I want to get ahead. Most people I grew up with work 40-70hrs a week, often two to three jobs. It’s natural for me to work that much. I don’t even blink at it. What else would you do? Play video games, watch tv, “party”? I can accomplish and build things and spend the rest of the time with family and fr…

> What else would you do?

Live a little? If you can't think of anything you would rather do than work you're living a sad life.

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

#242

Post by jsty »

jamesadevine wrote: post #229

Im all for a four day working week. Has any one thought about the impact on schooling and education? Education is centred around a 5 day working week (at least in the U.K.). Presumably teachers would not be eligible to work a four day week? This seems a little unfair. If workers move to a four day week, should schools do too?

If it wasn't a government-mandated day (e.g. Friday is now part of the weekend) then you'd have to ensure days off were split such that there was coverage of the whole working week - which is exactly what service industries that need more than 9-5 x 5 days a week availability often do currently.

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

#243

Post by piva00 »

lettergram wrote: post #194
piva00 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a clear example of one of Paulo Freire's best insights: "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." Go on with your career ladder game, not everyone in humanity praise that as much as you. On the contrary, lots will see you as either naive or moronic. Your 6x10 work schedule is being spent on creating... A chatbot.

> Go on with your career ladder game, not everyone in humanity praise that as much as you. On the contrary, lots will see you as either naive or moronic. We can critique how I choose to spend my time, but what about the alternatives? Play video games with strangers? Drink and dance? Play board games with friends? Go to church / mosque every day? Walk down paths to see pretty streams? Smoke pot and watch cartoons? Str…

> I work probably 40-50hrs a week coding/architecting and 10-20hrs a week managing a farm [cows, hay, honey] (plus 2-3 weeks out of the year doing 12 hr day harvesting).

So this isn't a 6 days a week x 10 hours in a job working through a promotion path. I'm unsure why you brought that up as a point before, it doesn't align to what you further exposed here.

Another point:

> You can try to regulate day(s), but if there’s people willing to work more they’ll set the standard.

Society will set the standard, not the ones who work more, society as a whole sets that. I'm originally from a society where working grueling 10-12 hours/day in an office is expected, the society I live now sees that as a major issue.

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

#244

Post by sokoloff »

anticensor wrote: post #197
sokoloff wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It emerged from government wage and price controls, wherein health care coverage was exempted. When employers couldn’t compete by raising wages (as that was made illegal), they chose to compete on health coverage. By the time the wage controls were rolled back, it was hard to get that genie back into the bottle.

There used to be a maximum wage in the United States?

There was not a maximum wage, but there was a prohibition on raising wages: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942#Co...

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

#245

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

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…

The main reason for meddle management existence is a recursive loop.

The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.

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

#246

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #169
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…

Your conclusions don’t follow. Most people are not doing exclusively mentally demanding technical work, which you admit, so why would you limit the work week based on that? And non strenuous work takes a nontrivial amount of time? I’m regularly solidly productive for 30-40 hours a week (tracked with RescueTime app). Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanu…

A lot of time spent doing "hard" things is unproductive. So many times I've worked on a hard bug long fruitless hours just to come back the next day and spotting the problem almost immediately. Quick cleanup tasks are important yes, but most of the time you can delegate those to newer employees that can actually learn from them.

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

#247

Post by TrackerFF »

charcircuit wrote: post #187

Meanwhile China is going to make us irrelevant with their 996 work week. I would prefer to stay ahead and build great products than lounging around for half the week.

Unless you work in a factory:

The 996 work culture is no threat - It's one of the most inefficient ways of working I've ever observed. Same goes for other equivalents found in Asia - too much of that "work" is just butts on seats either pretending to work, or straight up looking at the watch and twiddling thumbs. For any serious intellectual work, it's pure nonsense.

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

#248

Post by underdeserver »

Retric wrote: post #226
rebeccaskinner wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think we are talking about the same kind of difficult vs straightforward problems. Think professional chess players. While prepping they can spend very long hours playing/studding high level chess but tournaments are another level. Challenging is fun, the limits of human ability are always stressful. People can run for 11 hours in an ultra marathon but they can’t do it at 13+ mph pace of a half marathon.

Exactly. To me the difference is in scope, familiarity, and stress.

While I'm doing the task: 1) Do I have to hold 15 interdependencies in my head? 2) Is this something I did a million times in the past and do I already know exactly what the failure modes look like? 3) Is this something high-stress, e.g., is this the big project that's supposed to make my team look good or net me a promotion?

Wiring in a UI for a sophisticated CRUD can take 10 hours but it doesn't _really_ have that many interfaces, I've done it a million times, and nobody getes excited about it. It's just something you do.

Building a billing pipeline for a product is something I've never done before, is very-high-stakes for the business, and can go wrong in a bazillion ways, many of which are not my fault. There's no way I can imagine getting more than an hour or two of work on this per day.

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

#249

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

cbushko wrote: post #74
TeMPOraL wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really tell. I mean, there's enough people on HN who say they do pair programming at work, and some even that they do whole projects almost exclusively in some sort of group coding sessions - to me this seems like a bizarro world, so what do I know about majority of software jobs? For me personally, every software job I've done so far - including both the ones where I was one of few (or even the only) coders…

I've only had successful paired programming in one situation and it was amazing. I believe it worked because we were friends and at the same knowledge level. In three days, we ripped through a project that should have taken a month. Our 'C' code was perfect because there was always someone looking at it in real time and catching the errors on the spot. I do not think that I will ever encounter this level of productiv…

I've done a lot of pair programming with mentees and it's very rewarding. They usually learn a lot and it helps building a relationship with them. Bonus points if they see you struggling with a problem/bug.

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

#250

Post by 464746474 »

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…

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