I think we need to stop counting hours worked and start measuring results instead.
Sure, it's just that in many cases reliable, fair, and accurate result meters are not invented yet.
Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#22Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part…
It depends on the company. The company I work for right now had a software architect that worked 3 days a week only for a couple of months or so before going full-time (I think he was building a multi-monitor helicopter flight sim setup if I remember it right). From my talks with our CEO it seemed like he was open to that idea.
I'm definitely going to do something like this in the future though, but I'm still contemplating whether the 20-hour, 50% salary cut idea is better than working full time and taking a sabbatical afterwards.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#23Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part…
I'm an engineering student right now but I know exactly how you feel. I like the content but the thought of working full time terrifies me. I spent a couple of months as an intern/observer in a company and I can't imagine devoting my life to work. It would almost certainly make me burn out in a year or two.
I've been looking into jobs that work few hours but are highly qualified and they're usually outside consultants that get called in a couple of days a week. Apart from them there was one person who worked in a refinery that only had to be at work 20ish hours a week. She spent most of the rest at home on call or simply working from home. I recall that she enjoyed it.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#24I think we need to stop counting hours worked and start measuring results instead.
More than half the population would take a serious pay cut. In reality, I think they would if you could measure results easily without gaming.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#25Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part…
I did at a previous job. It was a small web development shop owned by a husband and wife, and around 7 employees. I was the lead developer there and getting bored with the work. I proposed that I work 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and be paid 60% of my salary. I spent Tuesday and Thursday working on my side projects.
Eventually the company went out of business, but I had great success with working part time.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#26Reducing commute and other wasted time is probably still the low hanging fruit for most people. If your work is sufficiently varied, I don't see how 60-80h/wk is unsustainable at at least 1.5x the work you'd accomplish in 40h, if (and only if) the other hassles of life are taken care of for you -- no cleaning, commute time, etc. I don't think I could do a single task for 80h/wk productively, but I could certainly do…
Setting aside whether 60-80 hours per week is sustainable (and I think it's not for most pople, except perhaps for 20-somethings and people with hypomania), the research this article references says that there isn't a 1-to-1 correlation between hours and output. That's the whole point.
"... increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time."
From about 1/3 down in the "The Overtime Exception" section.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#27Reducing commute and other wasted time is probably still the low hanging fruit for most people. If your work is sufficiently varied, I don't see how 60-80h/wk is unsustainable at at least 1.5x the work you'd accomplish in 40h, if (and only if) the other hassles of life are taken care of for you -- no cleaning, commute time, etc. I don't think I could do a single task for 80h/wk productively, but I could certainly do…
Setting aside whether 60-80 hours per week is sustainable (and I think it's not for most pople, except perhaps for 20-somethings and people with hypomania), the research this article references says that there isn't a 1-to-1 correlation between hours and output. That's the whole point. "... increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry…
Yes, but the study seemed fairly focused on single task performance. I don't think I can do a single task for even 40h/wk (maybe 20-30, tops), but running a startup or being dev/devops at a fast growing startup involves a lot of varied tasks. Performance on these doesn't really draw from the same pool.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#28Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part…
Seems like a good time to build a hefty savings and begin investing. I think if you were to go part-time, you'd lose some of your benefits. And if your employer is used to you working 40-hours, you might end up working more than 20-hours due to a higher workload. Depends on your situation, and it can't hurt to bring it up. Maybe try winding down your hours progressively.
I think he _does_ want to invest, but in experiences during his early 20s, rather than by building his finances.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#29Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question. I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week. The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part…
I did at a previous job. It was a small web development shop owned by a husband and wife, and around 7 employees. I was the lead developer there and getting bored with the work. I proposed that I work 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and be paid 60% of my salary. I spent Tuesday and Thursday working on my side projects. Eventually the company went out of business, but I had great success with working part ti…
there is actually e-book with similar topic:
Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week
http://jailfreebook.com/
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#30I once saw a tv documentary about the CEO of a big danish company. She worked 40 hours per week, and to that she commented: "If I couldn't get done what is expected of me in the allotted time frame, I wouldn't have the competence required for my position."
I once saw a janitor who always had more work to do. She worked 40 hours a week and then did the extra that the boss asked her about on any given day. She could've told him that cleaning desks wasn't in the contract. Or she could've reported the overtime. But not everyone has those kinds of luxuries if they want to keep their jobs.
Some jobs always have more shit to shovel, be it actual shit or feature creep. And some people will always expect you to shovel more next quarter/year.