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Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

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Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#51

Post by j7ake »

defrost wrote: post #21
j7ake wrote: post #12

There are 80 percent jobs, but unlikely for highly sought after careers(note career != jobs) with nonlinear payoff functions. Think of the NBA, Olympic athletes, or movie stars. The performance difference between the top 10 people versus unemployed is probably much less than 20 percent. In the extreme case: a 100 m sprinter sprinting 12 seconds vs 10 seconds is the difference between gold vs unknown.

Meanwhile, for the other 330 million people in the USofA who are not Olympic athletes or NBA superstars . . . It's nice that you address an unrepresentative teeny tiny micro sliver of the employed, but is there anything you can add for the majority?

Please note that the majority of workers in usa are on hourly wage.

So for the majority of workers, 80 percent jobs exist, but they are not desirable.

The people on hackernews do not represent the majority, but rather people who enjoy programming and want to make it a high paying career. Such luxury necessarily means it is highly competitive. Therefore I used the extreme analogy of professional athletes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#52

Post by Freak_NL »

nonethewiser wrote: post #44

I can see why companies don’t want this. I don’t blame them. It would be great to scale down work as needed. Instead of just completely retiring at some point. Especially given how high tech salaries are, it would be awesome to just start working half time at 40 or whatever. However, I personally find it very hard to limit my work hours that much. I feel like I would still end up working close to full time but just n…

You should blame them.

Some people do flourish with five days a week, some don't. Which is why it is great to have this as an option. I work four days, 32 hours, and I need that extra day off. Work is mostly out of my head when I stop on Thursday until I start again on Monday. I have a child to raise, a house to maintain, hobbies to pursue, and a partner with the same needs and, crucially, a job as well (also at 32 hours a week).

My company wouldn't have it any other way either. There is no benefit in forcing everyone to work five days beyond a small availability benefit. Happy workers are good workers.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#53

Post by j7ake »

fakedang wrote: post #20
j7ake wrote: post #12

There are 80 percent jobs, but unlikely for highly sought after careers(note career != jobs) with nonlinear payoff functions. Think of the NBA, Olympic athletes, or movie stars. The performance difference between the top 10 people versus unemployed is probably much less than 20 percent. In the extreme case: a 100 m sprinter sprinting 12 seconds vs 10 seconds is the difference between gold vs unknown.

Why compare apples and oranges? Most jobs aren't as NBA athletes, Olympic athletes or movie stars. Those aren't highly sought after careers either. That privilege goes to whichever careers pay more as a median. It's only kids who want to become moonshot stars.

Well most jobs are actually on hourly wage already, so 80 percent jobs exist for the majority of workers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncaplan/2021/03/12/americas-...

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#54

Post by corethree »

isoprophlex wrote: post #27
corethree wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles This isn't downstream impact. It's more of a choice. The women choose not to strive for senior level roles. They express this choice by choosing the 4 day work week. We shouldn't call it an unintended downstream impact because it's not something that should be corrected. I…

> If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles This is a myopic, reductionist take. You're missing the forest for the trees. It is not a matter of women choosing not to work as hard as men, it is a matter of society being structured in such a way that men are disproportionately not involved in raising a family, and women being delegated to the task…

Your the frog living in the well.

Think bigger. For eons and millennia society has been structured this way since forever. It's only in the recent three or four decades has there been a cultural shift. Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming.

Women taking home the money is a new thing. That only happened in the last 50 or so years. And the social pressures aren't even forcing them to take home the money. To women, it's just an option. For men the pressure is worse. For men it's a social requirement... the survival of the family unit still rests entirely on their shoulders.

But again this is besides the point. The main question here is, how does this new opportunity for women to make money suddenly make women deserve a hand out when they choose divide the time devoted to these new opportunities with care giving? You do less work and as a business owner I have to give you the same pay because you're entitled to it? How does that logic work out? It doesn't.

If an employee works 4 days a week and obviously has his/her attention divided to other endeavors how does he/she deserve a promotion? Are you kidding? Maybe in her eyes she deserves a promotion, but as a business owner I'd rather promote the single guy who is 100% dedicated because he's the one that actually deserves it.

That being said if society wants to make themselves better and give hand outs to women for caregiving... I'm all for it. But don't twist it any other way. What's going on here is a charity. A kind gift to caregivers who are not entitled to said gift in any way.

Don't come to me as if women deserve promotions because they have kids to take care of or social pressures to deal with. That's just garbage. Also don't get me started on the pressures on men, it's magnitudes larger than it is for women, magnitudes and we don't go around screaming for a handout.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#55

Post by oldpersonintx »

bjarneh wrote: post #15

> You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4 Administration of 5 people instead of 4, is that really a pro from an employers perspective?

Yup...95% of "HR" is your Workday intranet, scales very well, new employees do not require linear growth in HR

JIRA and Github automate/gamify work distribution and scoring, so even technical management need not scale linearly to rank-and-file

AWS means resources scale out without increasing ops headcount

Standardization of dev tooling provides pre-trained pool of workers

Etc etc...rank and file developers are becoming a human autoscaling group

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#56

Post by defrost »

corethree wrote: post #54
isoprophlex wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles This is a myopic, reductionist take. You're missing the forest for the trees. It is not a matter of women choosing not to work as hard as men, it is a matter of society being structured in such a way that men are disproportionately not involved in raising a family, and women being delegated to the task…

Your the frog living in the well. Think bigger. For eons and millennia society has been structured this way since forever. It's only in the recent three or four decades has there been a cultural shift. Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming. Women taking home the money is a new thing. That only happened in the last 50 or so years. And the social pressures aren't even…

> Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming.

> Women taking home the money is a new thing.

This is ill founded claptrap smacking of near zero exposure to working history.

Farms in history would fail without women doing vast amounts of seriously hard work.

Hunter-Gather societies mainly functioned on what was gathered, predominantly by women.

It took both working together to make these things work.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#57

Post by lynx23 »

ludwik wrote: post #34
lynx23 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am totally fine with 40-hours a week. However, what I am not fine with is people like you speaking for everyone else. You can work less then 40 hours already, volutnarily. But you are not qualified to determine how long other people are supposed to work, or actually knowing how long they would want to work. This "we need to work less" attitude comes from people that dont like they work. That is sad. But it doesn't…

I like my work and I like my life and I like my hobbies and I like my family and I like my friends and I like learning new skills in my free time. I chose to work 80% of the time for 80% of the pay but I'm fully aware that most people don't have that option (either because it is not offered to them or because it is not financially viable). Which I think is unfortunate.

Over 2/3 of the workforce actually does not like their job. Maybe start there, instead of reducing work time for everyone and likely dropping wages for everyone too.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#58

Post by saw-lau »

Several years ago the company I work for offered a 'compressed working fortnight' option, where for nine days out of ten you work an extra 45 minutes a day and then get every other Friday off.

For me, this was an absolute game-changer in terms of quality of life. The majority of the company took it up and there's really been no issue in terms of overall productivity that I can see. If I ever change jobs, whether or not my new employer offers this will be a huge consideration for me.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#59

Post by rpigab »

I'm in France, I work 100% (35 hrs/week, 5 days), and there are more and more part-time workers among my colleagues.

I think it's a nice option and that it should be a thing almost everywhere, and I might consider it myself in the near future, however there are drawbacks, a colleague is 60% and starts the week on Wednesday, but often parents take Wednesdays off, or half the day if 90%, or a full Wednesday every other week. Now let's add people like in the article, who like to enjoy Fridays off, at 80%. Why not, but now if you want to schedule a full team meeting, it's gonna have to wait until next Thursday. Even for little things, if you need it urgently on Mon. from the guy who starts on Wed., you're out of luck.

Also, we have full-remote for a few people, 2-3 remote days a week for most workers, and full-time on-site for select jobs. Contract workers might work on-site some days, or from their company's office, or from their home, or they might be working elsewhere some days if it's not a 100% contract. It's a nightmare to manage calendars, as there is no single source of truth on whether collaborators are present today or not. For employees, HR software can give you that information if it's up-to-date, but I think for legals reasons you can't have contractors availability listed in HR software.

People aren't used to communicating in an "async" way, it's not in the culture, it's not implemented well right now, and even if and when it's done well, projects tend to need longer periods of time to advance.

Also, the housing crisis is hitting hard. I couldn't have bought a nice house on 80% income, and I know full remote workers who bought theirs in the center of France, very far from big cities, often way cheaper, so they can do 80% more easily.

Re: Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

#60

Post by HelloNurse »

oldpersonintx wrote: post #26
rkachowski wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would require well defined tickets + work items with scope that is realistic, and an entire system behind the creation of these items which entails product + process understanding (not to mention designing tickets in a way which is minimally exploitable). If this could happen we would advance the state of project management into the sci-fi era.

The number of devs is well on its way to exceeding available work, so none of what you stipulate is necessary Employers can simply say : "this ticket is three hours of work and that is all that we will pay", and your choice will be take it or leave it We are well on our way to most tech jobs becoming "McJobs", this is one more step...HN really has its collective head buried in the sand in this regard imho I already s…

> Employers can simply say : "this ticket is three hours of work and that is all that we will pay", and your choice will be take it or leave it

In a way, a more empowering choice than being simply ordered to do something impossible.

Employees can simply say: "Dear boss, I bet it will be more like ten hours of work, but if you stand by your estimate you can do it yourself or spend some time looking for an optimist".

If the clock is ticking, estimates aren't going to be very aggressive; when no competent person accepts tickets nothing gets done.

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