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Why aren't there more 80% jobs?

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

#111

Post by flax »

I've been on a 80% job for the last 2 quarters. My employer doesn't exactly advertise it, but they offer it as one of the wellness options that were introduced with covid: voluntary unpaid sabbatical for a few months, etc. I was initially worried that taking the option for personal, rather than health, reasons would be frowned upon, but that does not seem to be the case. We'll see how this performance cycle turns out.

Subjectively, this is SO MUCH BETTER. I went from 2-for-me-5-for-them to 3-for-me-4-for-them which is a much better balance. I'm using the "extra" day for errands and to work on personal projects.

I would not recommend it for people looking to climb the ladder and maximize corporate status, but for those of us whose jobs are not our lives, this is a great choice.

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

#112

Post by chrisco255 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #75
chrisco255 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of NATO? https://nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/22...

There is a chart in there that disproves your point

The chart that shows about 90% of NATO's expenses is covered by the United States?

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

#113

Post by hnbad »

corethree wrote: post #35
hnbad wrote: 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…

> It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological.

Except that's not true, is it? It's somewhat consistent "across cultures" today, as are many things that are barely decades or centuries old. If you look at isolated peoples that are likely closer to "our biology", you see something very different. This makes sense if you consider that the atomic family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even agrarian societies did not necessarily have a division of labor across the gender binary: harvest meant everyone had to help, including children. Even the idea of blood kinship breaks down in agrarian Europe with farmhands being part of the family "unit" in a way more resembling adoption than employment.

> If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me?

I don't know what strawman you're trying to construct here but I never said someone working 4 days a week is entitled to the same pay as someone working 5 days a week if their contribution is entirely measured in hours. In fact I said nothing about pay or social welfare at all.

I do think it's funny you seem to value "more hours worked" as a measure of entitlement on a website that's literally all about "working smarter not harder"(what did you think a "hack" is?) but it sounds like you're more invested in evopysch nonsense and 2010s era pay gap discourse so I don't see any point in continuing this conversation.

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

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

chrisco255 wrote: post #112
quickthrower2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chart in there that disproves your point

The chart that shows about 90% of NATO's expenses is covered by the United States?

> The chart that shows about 90% of NATO's expenses is covered by the United States?

It doesn't show “NATO expenditures” it shows defense expenditures by NATO members, which is a very different thing, and the US share it shows is a hair under 69% in the most recent year shown, which is not “about 90%”.

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

#115

Post by WJW »

stdbrouw wrote: post #76
WJW wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emp…

> 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),

"It would be more expensive" is clearly not an insurmountable problem. "But they don't have the requisite knowledge" is also not insurmountable, as it can obviously be mitigated by extra training.

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

#116

Post by readthenotes1 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #48
caturopath wrote: post #32

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…

The communication overhead seems more than balanced by the extra redundancy you have when people do become unavailable (which they inevitably do) and people not burning out in quite as high a rate. But hey, I'm a Dutchman working 80%, so I'm sure I'm biased.

You might enjoy reading about Brooke's Law and Parkinson's Law.

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

#117

Post by unwind »

sgerenser wrote: post #64
unwind wrote: post #22

Meta: has the friendly HN title sanitization system removed "80%" from the start of the title? I feel it makes little sense as it's worded now (just "Percent Jobs") so perhaps that warrants fixing. Thanks.

Yeah, “Percent Jobs” was a very confusing title. Typo or copy-paste error by OP seems more likely as I can’t imagine in 2023 HN is choking on titles that start with a number.

I believe it's to discourage stuff like "10 Ways To Get Rich" or whatever, i.e. list articles are considered below us or something. Failed in this case.

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

#118

Post by twobitshifter »

corethree wrote: post #110
twobitshifter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have kids. It’s valuable for the greater good of society not just a child. You have to live with the eventual adults that develop under a system that supports caregivers or one that does not. If we don’t look beyond the first effect we can miss that. To further the point, the decision whether to have a kid can be influenced by how that affects someone’s own finances. These programs put a finger on the scale t…

More people means more pollution and greater resource consumption. Not everything is beneficial. Human society is well on it's way to the worst case scenario of global warming and accelerating population growth only exacerbates this issue. Why make me pay for that? Negative population growth has benefits. Japan doesn't have a housing crisis like the US. Like I said two sides to every story. I'd rather have flat popul…

Even if you are for depopulation, I think you would still like for the smaller population to be well fed, educated, and socialized. Those people would need to support the older and larger population both economically and in other ways.

The fairness argument is just a general argument against all redistribution of wealth, if you are against all redistribution then many popular programs and policies are already failing your moral test.

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

#119

Post by corethree »

kuchenbecker wrote: post #101
corethree wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it makes sense to promote dedicated workaholics to the highest echelons. They have maximal impact to business. If those workaholics are women then those women very much need to be promoted as well. The data actually shows this is already happening. It shows that when you control for the choices women make about child care... the gender pay gap is largely negligible. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-…

> Female Statistics Professor Claudia Goldin, the economic "Nobel" Laurette this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin

Oh yes, forgot to mention that.

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

#120

Post by corethree »

hnbad wrote: post #113
corethree wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological. Except that's not true, is it? It's somewhat consistent "across cultures" today, as are many things that are barely decades or centuries old. If you look a…

>I do think it's funny you seem to value "more hours worked" as a measure of entitlement on a website that's literally all about "working smarter not harder"(what did you think a "hack" is?) but it sounds like you're more invested in evopysch nonsense and 2010s era pay gap discourse so I don't see any point in continuing this conversation.

You can't quantify working smarter. It's a vague term.

What we do know, (and you know this as well you're just not thinking critically) is that over a large population those that generally work more hours get more done and do better across the board. That's a statistical and data driven metric. Not some hand wavy "work smarter" bullshit.

What are you implying? that women are smarter than men so of course if they put less hours in their smartness suddenly makes up for the stupidity that is men? Come on.

This isn't a strawman, it's called common sense.

>Except that's not true, is it?

You ask, so I answer: It is true. There are enough exceptions that someone can construct a counter argument/research paper via miscellaneous examples but the general majority across current cultures and past cultures that men take on the bread winner role.

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