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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)

#101

Post by jwatte »

throwaway1979 wrote: post #77
Sukotto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can bank the excess cash and "retire" as soon as 4% of your savings equals your annual expenses. (Work hard to maximize your salary and minimize your expenses) Between now and achieving that 4%, focus on excelling at the things you find the most interesting and building relationships in your industry so that once you cross the freedom line you can take on the occasional consulting gig to keep things interestin…

If I knew where to get a risk free, consistent 4% return these days ...

Half high yield bond funds, half blue chip stock funds, bank all earnings, re-balance once a year, and take out 4% a year from total. On average you will do just fine! (Check against history if you want to verify)

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

#102

Post by marvin »

jabbernotty wrote: post #44
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.

In countries with good overtime laws, you get overtime even in salaried positions. Where I live, there are _very_ strict laws about what constitutes overtime, and the limit is at 40 hours per week. For any work beyond that, you must get paid by the hour and get at least a 40% bonus above what you would normally make. If you do not get this, you can sue your employer and will win.

It is possible to get exceptions to this law, but no exceptions are possible on an individual basis - they must be negotiated across whole groups of employees by a labor organization. Such agreements allow certain groups of workers to 80 and 90-hour weeks, but the conditions and payment are very strictly negotiated. Another exception is for owners and founders.

Consequently, overtime is only used where strictly necessary. I think this is an excellent system to protect the rights of laborers.

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

#103

Post by throwaway1979 »

marvin wrote: post #96
throwaway1979 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I knew where to get a risk free, consistent 4% return these days ...

You won't get risk-free 4% return after inflation, but you can (probably) expect a 4% annual return on average if you put your money in the stock market. At least this is the assumption that the Norwegian Pension Fund, the world's largest stock market fund, operates with. Although it has been discussed to reduce this number to 3%.

Thx for the pointer. I have to look into them. The issue I have is that history prior to 2000 is not valid going forward. You can say that I'm a disciple of Nasib Taleb's Fooled by Randomness.

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

#105

Post by _delirium »

crusso wrote: post #64
arg01 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume you apply the same policy to the fact that the cost/productivity of machinery, process development, software means that for the same input share holders should be getting the value of a similar business of equivalent market share back in the day as well. If the money is not staying in the business you have a few choices if productivity increases, spread it around, funnel it up, or funnel it down. Since I b…

Funneling it up and funneling it down rewards the people who created the productivity increases. Spreading it around rewards an orthogonal group that did nothing to create the productive output and will siphon off it like a parasite. Spreading it around is inherently a worse way to decide where value should flow through a society; especially one as culturally diverse (ie, filled with many self-interested constituenci…

I guess I mainly think it produces worse societies that are worse to live in, without correspondingly incentivizing innovation appreciably. I've lived in both the US and Scandinavia, and the US feels barely teetering on the edge of "advanced first-world country" in comparison: poor infrastructure, bureaucratic healthcare that causes angst when switching jobs, large numbers of homeless people, huge prison systems, swathes of poverty-stricken ghettoes, visible class demarcations, etc., etc. It felt like such a weird place after I'd spent a few years away and went back, and I realized how it just didn't seem like a nice place to live, but I never realized it could be better than that (I had previously only compared the U.S. to clearly worse-off countries, like Mexico or India). Not just that I thought it was unethical that there were so many poorer people (which I did), but that it was also worse for me, as a middle-class professional, because of the existence of all these social problems. I guess I could've retreated to a gated community and attempted to create my own bubble, but I've had enough of the suburbs.

And I don't think you have to give up business or innovation to get it. If your Scandinavian startup becomes the next Mojang, you're still going to be fabulously wealthy, so I don't feel at all disincentivized by the distant possibility that I'll have to fork over a percentage of my hypothetical future millions (I'm certainly not going to move back to Texas just for that). There are more successful companies per capita than you'd expect (certainly more than most American states), and the economy generally still runs on a market basis, there's just a little more sharing of the wealth.

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

#106

Post by jimbokun »

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…

"I don't think I could do a single task for 80h/wk productively, but I could certainly do my primary job for 40-60h/wk productively and then spend 20h/wk doing meetings with users, conferences, etc."

What experiments have you performed to validate this hypothesis?

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

#107

Post by theorique »

nostrademons wrote: post #65
bokonist wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is generally a winner-take-all market. Software has zero marginal cost, so the company with the most revenue can invest the most upfront into making a better product, giving it even more revenue. Furthermore, in most cases there is little incentive for customers to ever use the second best product in a segment. So when building software, you not only have to meet the customers needs, you have to meet the cus…

One way around this, if you want work/life balance, is to timeslice on much longer increments, like a couple of years instead of a couple of days. Put in the long hours at the demanding job for a few years until you have a shippable product and demonstrable, tangible successes. Then take a year off to travel, found a startup, work on an open-source project, volunteer, or otherwise decompress, using the savings you go…

I can vouch for this.

I took about a year off to explore alternative careers and personal pursuits after working at a tech firm for 3 years. I returned to the industry and was recruited within a few months back into a spinoff from my original firm.

Of course, this presupposes that you maintain your skills, and that you don't burn any bridges when you leave.

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

#108

Post by bybjorn »

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…

Easy fix: Become a freelancer :-)

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

#109

Post by chubbard »

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…

Why not become a contractor and you are in control of how much you work because you really work for yourself? You might not control when you are on a project, but work hard for 3-4 months build up income, then when its done take some time off an live off what you built up. No need to leave money on the table because you don't think you need it now. Go travel, tour with your band, sit on your couch and eat cheesy poofs and pot pie, whatever. You can work as much or as little as you like.

Before you brush this off what you're talking about is a very tenuous relationship with your employer that isn't providing you any stability, AND more than likely you'll loose your benefits. Those are the same things you'd be giving up if you went freelance so there is little downside to freelance vs part time.

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

#110

Post by koof »

As a soon to be first time job hunter (beyond internships): how do I find jobs that aren't 50 hr+/wk death marches? Should I consider government? I say this because the internships I've already done I've been encouraged to work weekends.
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