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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)

#41

Post by rdl »

otakucode wrote: post #7
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…

But should you? Your employer will not reward you for it with anything that could be considered reasonable when compared to the value you are creating for them. What people can do, and what employers are willing to pay for, are two very different things. Employers, by and large, have adopted a strategy of paying employees as little as possible, divorcing their compensation from the value of their work. Capitalism say…

In a sufficiently supply-constrained field, assuming performance can be measured, your reward can be fairly closely correlated with the value you contribute.

The lack of correlation is primarily due to inability to measure contributions vs. an effort by employers to selectively screw high achieving employees. If you had perfect visibility into the current and future contributions of employees, it actually would make sense to pay the 10x employee 10x more than the 1x employee (and arguably being able to make a team of 5 x 10x employees would be worth way more than the equivalent salaries of 50 regular employees, since a 50 person team would be so large as to have 2-3 layers of management, much higher support costs, etc., so just paying the smaller team 10x as much would be a bargain.)

For a variety of reasons this isn't really done directly with cash compensation (taxes, measurement, supply shortage, envy of other employees, politics with managers, etc.), but rather by the 10x teams being startups which may get purchased.

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

#42

Post by fatbird »

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…

Few employers are open to ideas like this. At the end of the day, they might make a concession to keep you happy if you're valuable, but few businesses want to structure themselves to operate in this fashion.

However, you can accomplish something similar. If you only want half your salary, work full time for a year while saving half your salary, then fund a year long sabbatical for yourself. If at the end of that sabbatical you've done something interesting (created a new open source project, bootstrapped a business), then applying for a job at the end of that year will be easy. Rinse/repeat as desired.

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

#43

Post by larsberg »

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…

Even if your company offers it, you should be careful about taking it. There are a few downsides:

- Your advancement and promotion chances are basically zero in such a position. Not due to some conspiracy, but just because you're not around for half of the conversations people are having about the direction of the product/team.

- If it isn't standard practice for the whole team, they all start to slightly hate you, no matter the pay difference. Need drewb's input? Oh, it's Tuesday; that will have to wait until Thursday when special-boy is back in the office. I've seen this over and over (including on my own teams) with people who had been granted special work accommodations, and there's nothing you can really do about it, even as a manager.

If you want more time to yourself, I would much more highly recommend attempting to negotiate regular unpaid leaves of absence for a couple of months. Travel the world; really unplug from work; etc. It's both easier to fit into your career and your company's plans.

Or just go into consulting and only take n-month contracts that fit your lifestyle needs.

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

#44

Post by jabbernotty »

killface wrote: post #34

This is why any competent computer worker should never accept a salaried position. Sure, it's cool to say "I make 100k/yr!", but it's much cooler to say "I make 65/hr, but I got paid for that 4-hour conference call last night to troubleshoot production"

Obviously, one's mileage may vary. As a developer in the country I live in, the only positions are salaried positions.

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

#46

Post by Falling3 »

edj wrote: post #26
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…

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…

Not only does overtime not give you a linear increase in performance, but in my personal experience overtime it decreases overall performance.

I work at a small programming company where gratuitous overtime is the norm as a project closes. By the time things calm down again, we're so stressed out that our productivity probably falls by 50% or more for weeks to come. And the cumulative effect after years of this is even worse. I don't think the boss (also an overworked programmer) has yet to come to appreciate this daunting reality.

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

#47

Post by pwaring »

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 done it, though not to such a big extent. I work four days a week instead of five, due to a combination of less technical work available and wanting to explore other opportunities. Having a day off mid-week is also incredibly useful if you want to get things done like visiting the bank, which is always packed at the weekend.

Even on five days a week though, I was working less than 40 hours. Most people I know work 37.5 hours (if you exclude lunch), and the Working Time Directive places restrictions on the number of hours you can be asked to work if you're in the EU.

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

#48

Post by dsr_ »

crusso wrote: post #40
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, an…

You shouldn't.

You should push that button yourself in the morning, and save the salary entirely.

Consequences are left as an exercise for the student.

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

#49

Post by ido »

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).
That's not how capitalism works.
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