Sorry, when did they ever go away?
Bring back the 40-hour work week
11–20 of 91 posts
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#12I think overtime is often the consequence of managers that don't know when or how to say "no" to client's demands.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#13The 'knowledge worker' section would be a lot more convincing if it provided citations.
A larger question would be whether integrative living (i.e. working from home, spending your coffee breaks with your kids) impacts the optimal level of work.
I would bet that knowledge workers burn out FASTER from being overworked than manual laborers. Knowledge work, particularly the inductive side, relies on downtime in order to stay productive.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#14And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.
The rest of the article says that 50-hour-a-week employees are no more productive than 40-hour-a-week employees, and don't get paid any more. Where do the extra jobs come from?
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#15If the boss asks me to work 50 hours, I work 30. True story
But you still sit at work 50 hours, or you go home after 30 hours?
It's true that I'd rather go home after 30 hours instead after 50 hours, but it's also true that I would be bored to death just sitting at work and doing nothing those extra 20 hours.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#16If the boss asks me to work 50 hours, I work 30. True story
But you still sit at work 50 hours, or you go home after 30 hours? It's true that I'd rather go home after 30 hours instead after 50 hours, but it's also true that I would be bored to death just sitting at work and doing nothing those extra 20 hours.
[Irony]Isn't that what Hacker News is for??[/Irony]
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#17...but I'm quite happy with my 35-hour week, thankyou.
There's a lot that's wrong with the UK, but being forced to work for free thankfully isn't one of them.
I just can't imagine where people get the time for a 50-60 hour week. Once I've been to work, played with my son, fed, bathed, and put him to bed, and cooked, there isn't much time left in the day, surely?
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#18Fact is, I'm productive with a 8 hour a day schedule if and only if:
1. What I need to do is clear and known.
2. I've been doing the is same everytime or something of similar pattern.
3. No meetings and distractions in between.
For every person who wants to go back home, there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning. By the well known rate of success coming at an near exponential rate to people to work hard and are productive, the rate becomes exponential if they add crazy work hours to it.
Building stuff requires a goal. Then implementation, experimentation, test a feed back loop and then back to implementation. And then this cycle goes on in iteration.
This requires tuits(Uninterrupted large workable free chunks of time) to allow a degree of focus and flow seep into the person. And most of tuits are generally available only early in the morning or in the night. This by default means you already agree to work crazy hours.
So in summary, I can't do a 40 hour work week because
1. I will loose out to my peers in the long term race.
2. Meetings.
3. My work requires genuine supply of atleast two big tuits a day to remain competitive and have a good growth both money and career wise.Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#19The 'knowledge worker' section would be a lot more convincing if it provided citations.
A larger question would be whether integrative living (i.e. working from home, spending your coffee breaks with your kids) impacts the optimal level of work. I would bet that knowledge workers burn out FASTER from being overworked than manual laborers. Knowledge work, particularly the inductive side, relies on downtime in order to stay productive.
I'm guessing that having a shitty boss affects manual workers about as much as knowledge workers. Production drops; errors increase; sick leave increases; levels of stress are spread to colleagues; etc.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week
#20Fact is, I'm productive with a 8 hour a day schedule if and only if: 1. What I need to do is clear and known. 2. I've been doing the is same everytime or something of similar pattern. 3. No meetings and distractions in between. But the fact is, none of this is true in our area of work. To some extent even if something similar exists it wont work for many reasons. For every person who wants to go back home, there is a…
> there is always a peer who is putting in extra hours innovating, building and learning
For every peer putting in stupid hours innovating, building and learning there are > 1 peers putting in stupid hours fixing errors of other overworked colleagues or just grinding through the stuff they could have done in 40 hours if they didn't have an asshole boss / broken business culture.