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Bring back the 40-hour work week

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Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#51

Post by hkolek »

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.

I would just think this imaginary guy is an idiot. Unless he's working for himself but I don't think that's what you're talking about. You'd be pretty stupid to effectively work for free, or do you assume that this overtime gets paid? In any case, if the guy has no life and is happy to work all day that's just fine by me, I wouldn't care at all. And if he gets paid for that, that's great, he deserves it if he really works that hard and actually delivers quality results (which I doubt). You talk as if it would be a competition on who can work the most hours. I don't think it is.

Edit: If it's the money you're after I think you should try to work smarter not harder :-) i.e. if you're only way to get more money is to work more hours maybe you should find another job or change career.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#52

Post by jwingy »

Shivetya wrote: post #38

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 pe…

These concerns are addressed in the article.

tl;dr Working hours longer than 40 leads to counter productivity in the short and long term. 40 hour workers are more productive in all situations except those where workers have an abnormal singular focus (apparently symptoms of aspergers).

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#53

Post by lrobb »

In the renowned 1993 study of young violinists, performance researcher Anders Ericsson found that the best ones all practiced the same way: in the morning, in three increments of no more than 90 minutes each, with a break between each one. Ericcson found the same pattern among other musicians, athletes, chess players and writers.

For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/05/for-real-productivity-...

.

I don't expect 'managers' to understand this... Mythical Man Month is nearing on 40 years old, and apparently the current crop of tech leaders haven't bothered to read it.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#54

Post by kibwen »

jdietrich wrote: post #36

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 on…

"All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday."

Heh, at my current job I won't be eligible for paid holiday until eighteen months after my date of initial employment, at which point I will receive five days of paid holiday for one year, and then ten days of paid holiday for the next four years. That's a pretty stark difference, I'd say.

Is Europe hiring software developers?

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#55

Post by dagw »

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.

Now suddenly you will find yourself in a corner as he will grow(in comparison) inevitably

I completely fail to see the inevitability. People don't fall into a coma the minute they leave the office. If he's grinding away 5-6 hours extra hours alone in the office every day, while you're spending those 5-6 hours meeting new people, hanging out with friends and colleagues, learning new things and playing around with fun hobbies and projects, why should he grow more than you.

It's just as likely that two-three years down the road he'll be completely burnt out with a stagnant skill-set while you have a great network, varied skill-set, plenty of energy and are ready and able to use those to move onto bigger and better things.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#56

Post by steve-howard »

einhverfr wrote: post #13
swampthing wrote: post #2

The '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.

Overtime and burnout were covered in Peopleware back in 1987. Looks like we're doomed to relearn our lessons again and again...

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#57

Post by rimantas »

jbarham wrote: post #48
jdietrich wrote: post #36

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 on…

Given that e.g. the unemployment rate in Spain is 23% [1] and Greece is bankrupt, it seems a little quixotic to be highlighting European entitlements for workers, when the more pressing problem is obviously the huge numbers of people who are not working and cannot find work and to whom those entitlements are a bad joke. Indeed, some people might even posit a link between entitlements and the current economic mess in…

How about Germany, Norway, Sweden? I don't know about Spain, but 40 hours week was least of Greece's problem.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#58

Post by ovi256 »

kibwen wrote: post #54
jdietrich wrote: post #36

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 on…

"All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday." Heh, at my current job I won't be eligible for paid holiday until eighteen months after my date of initial employment, at which point I will receive five days of paid holiday for one year, and then ten days of paid holiday for the next four years. That's a pretty stark difference, I'd say. Is Europe hiring software developers?

In Socialist Yurop as well, in most countries, there are different rules on when and how much paid holiday you get in your first year, meaning you cannot get hired and take a month paid holiday, it has to accrue. So you would get a week after a few months, for example, then more, and so on. It looks fair to me.

And yeah, in all tech hubs I know of, everybody's looking to hire, the market is, maybe not red-hot like Silicon Valley, but pretty hot anyway.

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#59

Post by desas »

ordinary wrote: post #42
jdietrich wrote: post #36

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 on…

All workers are entitled to a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday. This is incorrect. In the Netherlands, at least, 20 days is the legal minimum, though most people get 25.

In the UK the minimum is 20 days.

A significant proportion of people get 25 days + 8 public holidays

Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week

#60

Post by bartmcpherson »

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…

Wouldn't applying some of your extra productivity to an open-source project be more beneficial to more people? Instead of having a difficult work environment with your co-workers you would have learned, created great stuff and been recognized by peers.
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