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Bring back the 40-hour work week

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Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#31

Post by bmj »

kamaal wrote: post #18

Fact 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 are two things that kill my 8-hour-day productivity:

  1.  Meetings
  2.  Someone upstream not doing their job.
#2 is far worse than #1 (and directly related to the parent's #1). There is truly nothing worse than a project manager who allows requirements to be delivered late, but doesn't push out the deadline for the entire project.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#32

Post by namenotrequired »

Personally, I used to work 40 hours a week, and felt that was enough and I shouldn't have taken on more. Then again I do a lot of volunteer work as well besides that, but it's something I love, and something I can do from home whenever I want and have the time. And as I live with my parents, I don't have a family to look after or anything, so it feels like that comes in the place of looking after my house and family etc.

Now they cut hours at my job and I work only 30, and I'd like to work 40 again. I find I often don't really do anything with those 10 extra free hours and I get less money.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#33

Post by marvin »

danmaz74 wrote: post #29
DanBC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a programmer who works for 13 hours a day. That programmer does three days in a row of 13 hours. That's 39 hours, not including any travel etc. Give / force them some time off before they can start another block of 40 hour work. "Flow" is mentioned so often, but I'd really like to see some good quality research to back it up. For sure people feel like they're in a zone, but how much of the code produced in t…

I completely agree that promoting the concept that "only" working 40 hours is lazy is completely wrong. But forcing everybody to always only work 40 hours a week would be wrong too. In Italy, theoretically, overtime hours have to be paid more than normal hours, which I think would be fair and good - this alone would make managers really think about the productivity of those extra hours. In practice, though, there is…

Case in point: Norway has some of the strictest labor laws in the world. The Norwegian Work Environment Act (Arbeidsmiljøloven) has very strict rules around overtime and overtime compensation, which cannot be changed through an employment contract. (Exceptions are possible where a labor union/worker organization is involved)

There are a lot of detailed regulations, but among other things, _all_ work over 40 hours a week is overtime and needs to be compensated at least 40% higher than regular work. And working more than 200 hours of overtime a year is actually illegal.

In practice, however, most employees and employers in the software industry just ignore these rules and save up these extra hours on a "flex time account" where they can take it out as paid vacation later, or with some luck, be paid in cash.

If you actually took a case like this to court and demanded the 40% bonus on all overtime, you would probably win. But there seems to be a gentleman's agreement between industry participants that this would be a bad idea. I have no idea why this is the case - I just assume that it is because a lot of IT workers have doormat tendencies and have a hard time claiming their rights.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#34

Post by kamaal »

bmj wrote: post #31
kamaal wrote: post #18

Fact 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 are two things that kill my 8-hour-day productivity: 1. Meetings 2. Someone upstream not doing their job. #2 is far worse than #1 (and directly related to the parent's #1). There is truly nothing worse than a project manager who allows requirements to be delivered late, but doesn't push out the deadline for the entire project.

Lets say #2 is not a problem for the minute and you meet somebody like you.

He and you do your day job in 8 hrs. But he puts in an additional 5-6 hours a day and is likely to put for the coming years.

Now suddenly you will find yourself in a corner as he will grow(in comparison) inevitably. And there will be little you can do.

Putting in crazy hours isn't mandatory, but neither is winning and succeeding.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#35

Post by DanBC »

kamaal wrote: post #24
DanBC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a programmer who works for 13 hours a day. That programmer does three days in a row of 13 hours. That's 39 hours, not including any travel etc. Give / force them some time off before they can start another block of 40 hour work. "Flow" is mentioned so often, but I'd really like to see some good quality research to back it up. For sure people feel like they're in a zone, but how much of the code produced in t…

A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable. I like working a lot, making great stuff. Some people don't. But that's not my problem. Asking me not to work, just because some…

I didn't downvote, but you might want to consider comments like

> Soon a bunch of girls went

Which appears to be fantastically sexist. (Although that's another huge thread.)

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#36

Post by jdietrich »

I keep reading these sort of articles and wondering why the American people seem so opposed to basic employment law.

Here in Socialist Yurop, the Working Time Directive means that no employer can compel an employee to work for longer than 48 hours per week. All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday.

You all seem to agree that you work too long and don't get enough holiday. I've never once heard anyone say that they're happy with two weeks vacation and unpaid overtime. I'm not asking rhetorically, I genuinely want to know why the most basic sort of collective bargaining is absent from the political culture of the US.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#37

Post by danmaz74 »

marvin wrote: post #33
danmaz74 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that promoting the concept that "only" working 40 hours is lazy is completely wrong. But forcing everybody to always only work 40 hours a week would be wrong too. In Italy, theoretically, overtime hours have to be paid more than normal hours, which I think would be fair and good - this alone would make managers really think about the productivity of those extra hours. In practice, though, there is…

Case in point: Norway has some of the strictest labor laws in the world. The Norwegian Work Environment Act (Arbeidsmiljøloven) has very strict rules around overtime and overtime compensation, which cannot be changed through an employment contract. (Exceptions are possible where a labor union/worker organization is involved) There are a lot of detailed regulations, but among other things, _all_ work over 40 hours a w…

I think that this is in part because in the software industry we feel much stronger ownership of our projects than in most other jobs... for example, a couple of years ago I put a lot of (unpaid) overtime without being forced at all, just because I wanted the project to succeed and there was no other way to achieve success than for me to work on it myself (even if in theory I was just the project manager and sales engineer).

The flip side is that the project did succeed, this success brought a lot more money than originally expected to my firm, and I didn't get a fair bonus. Now I only work (serious) overtime if they agree to pay me beforehand, and I'm working on my startup(s) on the side.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#38

Post by Shivetya »

I believe hours worked is only relevant to the type of work being done. Yet I think it is overall unrealistic to expect a forty hour week. Having been raised on a farm I know that forty hour weeks are a vacation to some, even now self employed people would scoff at forty hours. We have great examples of what happened to many of these prized union jobs that limited work to forty hours on top of rules that prevented people from doing "other people's work". Not many of them are good, hence they moved into government jobs where there it is much harder to bankrupt the employer for lack of production.

You work forty hours a week to be average. No one I know who is well off works only forty hours a week. Now they don't do the same tasks all those hours but they are doing something. The key is making sure the hours you put in are beneficial not just "doing work".

The rest of the world certainly isn't going to work just forty hours a week. They upcoming economies are going to put in whatever it takes to get where they want to be. Those of us who sit back and claim enlightenment by denouncing such hours are only going to end up being passed by.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#39

Post by AlexandrB »

kamaal wrote: post #34
bmj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two things that kill my 8-hour-day productivity: 1. Meetings 2. Someone upstream not doing their job. #2 is far worse than #1 (and directly related to the parent's #1). There is truly nothing worse than a project manager who allows requirements to be delivered late, but doesn't push out the deadline for the entire project.

Lets say #2 is not a problem for the minute and you meet somebody like you. He and you do your day job in 8 hrs. But he puts in an additional 5-6 hours a day and is likely to put for the coming years. Now suddenly you will find yourself in a corner as he will grow(in comparison) inevitably. And there will be little you can do. Putting in crazy hours isn't mandatory, but neither is winning and succeeding.

Unless he's a machine, his 5-6 hours will be producing shitty, sloppy code that others will have to fix later. This is not a net-positive.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#40

Post by Daniel_Newby »

DanBC wrote: post #35
kamaal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable. I like working a lot, making great stuff. Some people don't. But that's not my problem. Asking me not to work, just because some…

I didn't downvote, but you might want to consider comments like > Soon a bunch of girls went Which appears to be fantastically sexist. (Although that's another huge thread.)

How is that sexist?
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