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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

#291

Post by vouwfietsman »

ghiculescu wrote: post #176
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 make this claim about the US is to overlook that basically all western countries have 40 hour work weeks. Are they all failing democracies too? Its a shame how many Americans are too busy hating America to look outside the border and see how good they have it, but also how most of their “uniquely American” problems are not unique at all. (My perspective is as an Australian living in America. And my comment doesn’t…

This is not really true though, 40 hour working weeks are very much not something western countries "have" in the general sense of having a constitution or police force. In many western countries, especially northern Europe, it is a given that parents (especially women, but also men) work less than 40 hours, even in demanding jobs. As a more general example, the municipalities of many cities in the Netherlands consider 36 hours a full time job, in the sense that getting paid more than 36 hours is actually beyond your contract and working that long is very unlikely to happen. Personally I work a demanding tech job with 32 hours a week, like others in this thread, this does not hurt my performance.

The real problem, and reason I suspect you use the word "have", is that this is fundamentally a cultural issue where the resolution is not for "the bad companies to stop demanding all this work" but actually the entire society moving away from the idea that work is somehow the only way to constructively spend your time, and for money being the only value that is worth pursuing.

Concretely what this means is that the fetishization of work must stop. This includes hustle culture, the idea of "side" or "passive" income, and the glorification of high salaries and high work "ethic" (see the use of the word ethic there, super interesting right). Opening hackernews itself, you can see that this mindset is widespread and actually not enforced by companies.

If you look around the world, you will see that many societies don't work this way. Western societies became like this, for better or worse, through religion, specifically protestant christianity. If we look back now, saying that this is a good or bad thing is complete nonsense, but looking at the present we can desire for things to be different, and that desire is what is missing.

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

#292

Post by a_humean »

renewiltord wrote: post #236
np- wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Generally when I see someone say "republic not a democracy" they are typically Americans with (far) right authoritarian/illiberal political beliefs that you don't say out loud in polite company, but if you call them out on it you get called an alarmist.

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

#293

Post by seer »

bavila wrote: post #118
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…

> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless... I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, b…

I feel like frontend work has some unique characteristics as opposed to hardcore backend one, at least for me. I feel like the parts of the brain that deal with visual and the analytical are not overlapping much so if I alternate between the two I can do a lot more hours of continuing work, resting one while the other centre is busy. Definitely can't do that doing hard algorithmic work, where I would clock out in just a few hours.

But I think there is something else though - frontend work is usually less abstracted and more menial - a lot of repeating various tasks, moving stuff around, fine tuning it by eye etc.

When I encounter something like this on the backend I would step back and spend time actually automating that with a function/library/package/framework and only then come back to the task at hand. Thus my time is usually more "concentrated" with making decisions, logic and calculations.

But frontends are usually so vast and complex pieces of software that its harder for me to abstract and automate away ideas, and its easier to just plow away through some visual task rather than step back, distil the logic into an abstraction and then go and use that abstraction effectively. That does happen but at least for me a lot less often than backend logic.

I would aim to distil the backend code down to its business logic and almost nothing else where possible, grinding away replication, but I (and people I've tended to work with it seems) don't seem to strive for that on the frontend for some reason, at least not in the same degree.

Which ultimately makes this environment quite a lot less mentally challenging to work in. You can "zone out" doing something and let muscle memory do its thing, whereas if I ever start to feel that working on the backend code, I have an alarm in my mind shouting "something's wrong! there's a missing abstraction!"

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

#294

Post by vouwfietsman »

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…

> 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.

Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people")

The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.

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

#295

Post by fernandotakai »

QuercusMax wrote: post #78
skellington wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no doubt that most companies (and the government) could cut 20% with no effect on their productivity. It's just no practical to ride the razors edge of leanness and it also would probably harm morale. Twitter cut 80% of it's workforce and is becoming MORE productive.

They cut the group responsible for responding to pictures of children being abused. I don't want to work at a place that considers this "more productive". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/australian-twitter-st...

it's not like twitter was properly handling CSAM before Musk

https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/twitter-lawsuit-m...

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

#296

Post by stuaxo »

keyraycheck wrote: post #280
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…

+1 That is true for deep work like: - solving mathematical problems - coding non-trivial stuff - teaching non-trival stuff The challange is shallow work e.g. - replying to emails - meetings - scheduling meetings And than there is no-work: - checking your phone - lunch - walking and chatting before the next meeting Shallow and no-work can easily eat anywhere between 20 and infinity :)

Even "shallow work" isn't done as well during the extra time.

Besides - doing meetings well is not shallow work at all; scheduling is a pain etc and emails are written better when people aren't tired.

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

#297

Post by Gatsky »

lettergram wrote: post #88
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…

I actually work 6 days a week (only Sunday off) noon until midnight with a two hour break 5-7pm. That’s 60 hrs of work a week, but I get to spend every morning 7am-noon with my kids. It’s been a great change of pace for me personally. We have a garden we do as a family, I can do doc appointments, some field trips, etc. while still working extremely hard. It’s not for everyone, but that schedule has been great for me…

Predictably, you are being downvoted.

Fact is, some people can just work harder than others. This is obvious is it not? It is not because some people are lazy and others aren't. It is not a moral issue. Some people just have higher energy levels in my experience (I'm not one of them, as a type this at 8pm nearly comatose). They just have more capacity. I think it is genetic.

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

#298

Post by drdrek »

ravenstine wrote: post #21

Good. If civilization isn't moving to improve quality of life, but to make sure that we keep working more and more, we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the point of technological progress.

Seems like the answer is total amount of human life. When you had 10K humans you could just walk around your cave and find enough food for everyone. When you had 10M humans you started tilling fields and created organizations to manage collection and storage. now you need incredibly complex machines, that require incredibly complex supply chains to feed 10B.

(food as an example. its the same for clothing to not freeze, shelter to rear offsprings, culture to not kill each other etc)

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

#299

Post by bachmeier »

xyzelement wrote: post #64
bachmeier wrote: post #6

> The rest were convinced by revenue gains, drops in turnover and lower levels of worker burnout that four is the new five when it comes to work days. This is not surprising. The 20% of time that's getting cut is probably the 20% that shouldn't have been done anyway. Telling workers they can cut the 20% of the crap they hated doing is obviously going to lead to better results.

Do you make the same interpretation when companies cut 20% of the workforce instead?

Late reply, but for the record, I think those are largely orthogonal. If you have 20% fewer workers spending their time on the same useless meetings and filling out the same forms and so on, it won't matter. Cutting the number of hours rather than the number of employees forces a rethink of processes.

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

#300

Post by quailfarmer »

blakesley wrote: post #207
lettergram wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Play video games, watch tv, “party”? Sorry, but this is such a sad statement to me. I mean, unless you absolutely love the field you work in, in which case that's amazing, go for it! But if you're like the rest of us, there's so much to see & do in life besides work! As an example, I'm reading, learning to cook, traveling, and trying to get fit. These provide their own satisfaction & meaning…

On the contrary, I feel sort of sad that so many people seem to find their work unfulfilling. I work a job that’s more work than some alternatives could be. I could at any point quit and find easier work that paid better. But I chose to work here, right? I’m privileged enough to not be obligated to stay. I’ll assume most people here have similar flexibility.

I find the “cooking as alternative” suggestion interesting too. I can understand the desire work on a creation for yourself (a meal), but for me that’s balanced by the desire to create something amazing for the world. By the same token, I could take every Friday off and work on a side project, but fundamentally that’s not going to be as fun or productive as working on the main project I’ve chosen to work on: ie, my job.

Now raising a family I can totally see as a competing interest, if I were raising children I would be working less. But I’m not (yet).

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