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Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

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Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#31

Post by jabbernotty »

shahchip wrote: post #23
drewblaisdell wrote: post #9

Perhaps 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 consultant…

To me, making a 40 hour work week is not the same as "devoting my life to work". Obviously there is a relationship there, but even if you have two hours of travel time each workday, and you work 8 hours a day (add a half hour break), there is time to do other things than work on a workday.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#32

Post by pnathan »

I've been on death march projects before; these projects simply burnt people out and quality was atrocious. There's a point where you don't care much about the job, all you want to do is go home and perform $favorite_mindless_relaxation. It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life.

I get concerned when I see people celebrate things like weekly hackathons running into the early morning hours, working 60+ hour weeks, etc. Of course it can be needful, but it's also not a sustainable work pace doable for 30-40 years without massive personal issues for the vast majority of people.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#33

Post by duck »

drewblaisdell wrote: post #9

Perhaps 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've seen a couple companies looking for exactly that recently (I'll see if I can find them), but I think you might have to adjust your numbers a bit... 50% cut in salary != hours/2 as it won't cover their fixed costs (like healthcare and G&A costs).

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#35

Post by latortuga »

enraged_camel wrote: post #11

I think we need to stop counting hours worked and start measuring results instead.

There's this almost cult-like obsession with measurement among the hacker crowd where everything must be measured and optimized. Unfortunately, people don't work this way. Telling people that they haven't measured up to some arbitrary standard is a significant demotivator. If you are measuring your workers on some chart, they'll begin either gaming the chart or comparing against each other, neither of which will motivate them to do better work - it will motivate them to optimize whatever you're measuring. I saw this at my last job and it was blindingly, painfully obvious how bad of an idea it was but management kept it up.

Take a support staff for example. What do you measure? How many calls they make? That incentivizes making lots of short calls. How many notes about clients calls they made? That incentivizes leaving lots of minimum length notes. Am I a worse support staff member if I leave longer notes and make longer calls? How do you accurately measure the "results" of a support staff? By customer retention? Good luck correlating individual client retention to specific support staff when customers talk to many different employees during a sales or support process.

Once you get past people who create objective value for the company, measurements are difficult to impossible. Measuring against an arbitrary standard is worse than doing nothing because it demotivates employees who aren't as high up on your arbitrary standard. Not everyone at a company has a direct impact on revenue - janitor, accountant, sysadmin, chef, etc.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#37

Post by masklinn »

pnathan wrote: post #32

I've been on death march projects before; these projects simply burnt people out and quality was atrocious. There's a point where you don't care much about the job, all you want to do is go home and perform $favorite_mindless_relaxation. It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life. I get concerned when I see people celebrate things like weekly hackathons running into the early morning ho…

> It's deleterious to your health, your relationships, and your mental life.

And your mental hygiene, there's no way you're going to think about (let alone implement) that idea of yours when you're mentally exhausted.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#38

Post by allsystemsgo »

This may work among programmers, software developers, etc. But in other more structured environments [management consulting, public accounting, I-banking, etc] a 40 hour work week will almost never be the norm. Sure, more resources could be added to the project, but the budget doesn't support that, so... you're hosed.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#39

Post by masklinn »

rdl wrote: post #5

Reducing 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…

> 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.

Although driving may also tap into it, the issue is mental burnout. Cleaning or eating doesn't take mental capacity, thinking does and that is in short supply (as the article notes, study show there's about 6h of good thinking per day in an average individual). Yeah might be able to "productively" work 80h/week if half that was cleaning the toilet... why?

> I could certainly do my primary job for 40-60h/wk productively and then spend 20h/wk doing meetings with users, conferences, etc.

No, you might think you do.

Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

#40

Post by crusso »

otakucode wrote: post #6

40 hours? No. Average worker productivity has skyrocketed since 1980 with the introduction of computers and automation technology. Salaries have remained flat. A 20 hour work week with the same salary would be far more reasonable (though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce).

though still very far off the mark of paying employees according to the value that they produce

Employees aren't really compensated for increases in output that are achieved through standard business practices, technology, automation, etc.

That's because their relative input remains the same.

Same input, same salaries.

If I'm starting a business mass-producing widgets and I fund the machinery, process development, and software to produce that -- why should I pay extra for the employee who really only has to push the big red button to start the machines going every morning?

Just because a lot of value is produced when he pushes that red button doesn't mean that he should be highly compensated.

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