Live data from Hacker News

Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

evertpot.com

71–80 of 131 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". I…

Our debt-saturated world means this is never an issue

Car payments, Klarna bills, student loans, credit card bills, rent...these are all the pitchforks prodding people to take the work...America has a massive pool of must-workers

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

#72
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands are not in Scandinavia?

Ok, I meant Scandinavian influenced or Scandinavian-like countries.

Why not type that in your original post then? Seems obvious to me. Perhaps there needs to be more US-like innovation in education where you were raised, or perhaps in the US overall?

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

#73

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…

What is this? 4chan?

I will not engage in much of this angry diatribe because if you use words like "charity" and "hand outs", you're placing yourself on a level of discourse reserved for redpilled /pol/ commenters and angry incels. Please reflect on the high emotional content, and where these emotions flow from. It's not pretty imo.

The one comment I want to make is that you're missing my point, out of your own malice or out of my lack of clarity, so here goes.

I tell my coworkers (I'm male) that I'll be gone for three months after the birth of our daughter: "but isoprophlex, you don't breastfeed, why stay at home at all?". Out of ~15 weeks leave, only one is fully paid. As long as societies, and expectations, are structured in such a way that women are pressured into leaving the workforce (relatively compared to men), the divide will keep existing.

This was my point.

No need for frothing about how you'd "never promote a 4d/wk resource over one who's 100% dedicated."

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

#74
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to see someone on HN of all places equate longer hours with "working harder" or being more qualified for senior roles. Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreati…

>Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider". It is not an expectation. It's been part o…

I actually do support handouts for women or men raising kids. This social labor goes unpaid but it’s extremely valuable for society. Instead we are following the economic arrow pointing us towards an arrangement where childcare is farmed out to chaotic day cares.

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

#76
post #6
post #2

I believe the Netherlands stipulates the requirement to offer every job as either part or full time, and a substantial number of job applicants go for the part time option, especially women. Interestingly, there have been some unintended downstream impact of this progressive law, such as lower women participation in senior level roles.

Explanatory page at https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst... (Dutch only AFAICT, sorry) Employers are almost required to approve a request to work less hours than full time. The reasons why it would not be allowed are fairly minimal. The only reasons allowed are: - Nobody else can take over the work (ie very specialized knowledge) - Insurmountable problems with work shift planning (simply havin…

I googled around a bit for legal cases and for advice aimed at Dutch companies, but because the law is so recent there's not much. My hunch (as someone who is perfectly clueless about legal matters) is that a restaurant or a shop might find it hard to argue that replacing one full-time worker with two part-time workers is impossible (given that the work is already organized into shifts) but perhaps companies that employ knowledge workers could successfully argue that you can't hire two part-time coders to do the work of one full-timer because the additional coordination costs in terms of additional meetings, additional equipment (i.e. laptop), perhaps the need for additional management personnel, and so on, are an unreasonable demand on the company. I could also see demands to reduce work to 4/5 be rejected when few people at work share your job description, because finding another employee willing to work 1/5 is really hard.

There's also the power dynamic to think of: are you really going to ask your boss to change your hours if you think that he/she will react badly and only grudgingly allow it?

Or maybe I'm completely off base... but anyhow, I guess I just wanted to point out that it's not clear to me whether this law has teeth.

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

#77
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're just not very well versed in the region: https://nordicperspective.com/facts/netherlands-scandinavia-... Please Read this for education. Then you can stop pretending there's no relationship between the two as if it's completely ludicrous that I would even compare the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

I'm Danish and live in Copenhagen...

well read it. Now you know.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is this? 4chan? I will not engage in much of this angry diatribe because if you use words like "charity" and "hand outs", you're placing yourself on a level of discourse reserved for redpilled /pol/ commenters and angry incels. Please reflect on the high emotional content, and where these emotions flow from. It's not pretty imo. The one comment I want to make is that you're missing my point, out of your own mali…

Then don't engage. Go away.

I gave my opinion in good faith and you turned around and spewed vile personal insults. We're done.

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

#79

Many good points, but I think there are some major errors. > For the salary cost of 4 employees at 40 hours, you get 5 employees at 32 hours. The real costs of paying 5 people 80% salary is much greater - benefits, many overhead costs, etc. do not get cut by 20%. > You get the combined experience of 5 people instead of 4. At most margins, having more human beings is NOT a clear win. Communication overhead, diffusion…

It's even worse in defense consulting.

- I've seen people billed at 2x salary because overhead includes work area cost, management chain cost, passthrough percentage, etc.). None of that overhead is likely to be at 80%.

- Defense consulting often involves combined staffing from different companies. For example, if BigCorp partners with ThreePhdsInABox on a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project, then the rules are often interpreted to mean 51% or more of the staffing has to come from the small business (usually). This is measured in terms of number of people on a project, not total cost of each person.

- For classified efforts, the cost of a clearance can run up to $50,000 per person, depending on the clearance. This is the same whether the person is 10%, 80%, or 100%. If they are already cleared at the needed level then this isn't an issue.

I don't see this happening in defense consulting until/unless the government goes to a mandatory 32 hour work week. That said many government projects have a mandatory 40 hour week, and some defense companies have an unwritten expectation of 50 hours per week, so the new unwritten will likely be a 40 hour week.

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

#80
I like how people give many reasons about why 32 hour work weeks is a bad idea, but are somehow settled on the magical 40 hour agreement. Even if all of those are valid, the very same reasons can be applied to an argument for 48 hour work weeks or 60 hours like in many Chinese tech companies.
Post reply on HN