Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like 7%, because that should be 4% after inflation...
Shouldn't the percentage of savings go down if you adjust for inflation (i.e., larger savings)?
Inflation is always bad for capital and good for debt.
Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
121–130 of 246 posts
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#122Perhaps 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…
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…
The second aspect of software development is that a developer working 40 hours a week is more productive than two developers working 20 hours a week.
I am unsure that this is true in all circumstances.
So the net result of these factors is that a company must work at maximum efficiency, and maximum efficiency comes when all developers are working 40+ hours a week.
I know for a fact that this isn't always true - since I've repeatedly seen teams of developers doing 45+ hour weeks become more productive by every metric we had to hand by dropping their working week to 40 hours (with only about 6 hours a day of that being coding).
I talk about this in a little bit more over here before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3883362)... copy/paste below.
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There is something deeply broken about equating hours to productivity.
It's been my experience that folk are very good at deceiving themselves about their productivity (myself included :-)
One team I worked with had a serious problem with overtime. They were putting in stupid hours and it was showing in the quality of work going out. So I ran an experiment where we all agreed to work "normal" hours for six weeks.
I was "only" working about 45 hours a week at this point, when other people on the team were regularly working 50-60. I was relatively young, didn't have any family pressure, enjoyed my work and felt very productive doing those hours. I wasn't one of the people with a "problem" as I saw it. We were running the experiment for the other folk on the team.
In the experiment we dropped to a 40 hours week (6 hours coding per day, 2 hours for breaks, meetings & lunch). After a couple of weeks adjustment my productivity went way up. I also felt a lot better in myself - generally sharper and more on the ball.
People seem to have quite a wide bad of "this feels okay" that subsumes the much narrower "I'm performing at my best".
Also people don't jump from a 35 hour week to 60 hours a week. It creeps up a few minutes at a time as pressure increases on the team. People have enough time to adjust to it being "normal" and don't notice the drop in productivity that goes with it.
Currently I work roughly 25-30 hours a week and am just as productive by all metrics that I have available to me as when I worked 40-50.
I would strongly urge people to experiment. Pick some metrics, try working shorter hours for a month, see what happens.
(The only caveat I would add is that with folks doing silly hours - anything over 50 I would say - there is often a couple of weeks where things go to hell as the body adjusts. On the team from the story practically everybody caught a bug and felt crap for the first week or so before productivity rose again).
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#123Perhaps 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 had success doing something similar at a previous company. I was able to switch to part-time at an equivalent hourly rate. My reason was that I was finish to go to graduate school simultaneously. I wasn't able to keep most benefits, but it wasn't a huge concern since I was young and still in grad school. The company got a good deal (without benefits, they got more work per dollar), and I got a good deal (in finding a part-time job at a higher rate than I would have anywhere else.)
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#124Perhaps 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…
My case is not exactly as yours, but no one's really is so...
I made a project for an eCommerce company a few years ago and then left but always kept in touch with people there. I changed jobs and took a remote position working for a US based company here from Brazil so my working hours were 12-9PM due to the timezone difference so I had free mornings.
After a couple of months the first company (eCommerce) made me a proposal for a full time job that I didn't take because it was good working from home at the time. However I said that I could work part time 2-3 hours everyday for them. They took it and it was very good for both of us since I had an extra paycheck (I was earning as much as a full time employee) and they had me working on important stuff with no interruptions since I was there just a little bit everyday and could not be held accountable to day to day things.
I stayed like that for the past 3 years when I went working for them full time because I got tired of working remotely for a company that wasn't really in a remote-work-culture.
Developers are easy to find. Good developers are not. Bottom line is, if your value proposition to the company is good I cannot see why they wouldn't accept you working part time there. If it's good from the business perspective and you can demonstrate that to them it's pretty much a cost-benefit decision and not an emotionally one.
If you are really into it and wanna give it a try (obviously with some risks) you could say: "Shall we try for a month and see what happens?". After the first month there is not going back ;)
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Knowledge worker" in a study cited from Alternet is probably "programmer at a large soul-sucking corporation." Startup founder is fundamentally different.
Why? What is different?
Motivation.
Motivation to build what you really want to build is completely different from being motivated to work for a salary to avoid starvation and keep your family going.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 moti…
>>There's this almost cult-like obsession with measurement among the hacker crowd where everything must be measured and optimized. Yes. One of the pioneers of business, H. James Harrington, said, " “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you ca…
Unfortunately, that argument is flawed for several reasons.
Firstly, in practice, measurement is not free. It incurs overheads of various kinds, and there is no guarantee that any benefits ultimately obtained will outweigh those overheads.
Secondly, the series of negatives doesn't logically imply the initial positives.
Thirdly, it is not self-evident that all of those negative implications are actually true, particularly the first.
I suspect many of us have at some point heard the word "This needs to be managed!", but they always seem to come from middle managers whose own contributions are of debatable value and who never seem to have a good answer when the return question is "Why?".
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#127The 40-hour week is forever gone in the startup world, and that is simply one of the trade-offs in having moved from a world where big enterprises emphasized long-term relationships with defined pension benefits and health coverage for life to a new world in which such enterprises have faltered and sunk only to be displaced by the startups that disrupted them through technical and other innovations. One can howl at the moon over these developments but is it really desirable to revert to an older day where a faithful employee's reward for long-term service was getting a gold watch on retirement or a $10K bonus for having invented the thing that made the employer hundreds of millions?
On a technical legal note, U.S. overtime laws have long since institutionalized the 40-hour week for non-exempt (generally lower skilled) employees and that remains the overwhelming norm in the economy. In that sense, there is no need to "bring back" the 40-hour week. It never went away.
If, as the author seems to espouse, the goal is to impose a strict weekly limit on the higher-skilled employees as well (in the case of Silicon Valley, tech professionals), it takes laws to do that and laws restrict freedom. Granted that efficiency studies might cause some employers to adopt strict hourly limits as a matter of company policy, or that individual lifestyle choices might cause a given employee to run in horror from the idea of slave-like work hours, do tech professionals really want to be prohibited from making such choices for themselves? It is one thing to say that laws are needed to protect those who cannot protect themselves. It is quite another to impose the force of law on what really is a lifestyle choice to be made by those who are equipped and smart enough to make it for themselves. Trying to "bring back" the 40-hour week from this perspective is, in my view, a very bad idea that would seriously harm the tech-driven companies that populate the startup world.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#128The article is self-contradictory. It argues at length that working more than 40 hours a week reduces your output, then states: "And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law." The math they're usin…
agreed. and it seems to use some fuzzy math where working less hours makes proportional space for an extra employee to fill in those hours. in fact, the value of extra employees ranges from marginal to non existent depending on the size of team/company due to the overhead. Unless we're talking about a coffee shop where not much collaboration is needed to get projects done, just pure clocking in and out and performing isolated tasks.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#129At first, I thought this was a french post complaining about the 35-hour work week ... looks like nobody will ever agree.
Re: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure where your definition of Capitalism is coming from, but nothing about capitalism or free markets requires (or even predicts) that workers will be paid commensurate to the value they create. Workers are paid based on supply and demand. If moving a pile of manure from one side of a parking lot to the other will net me $100,000,000, that doesn't mean the laborer I hire to move the manure will share in the v…
I think both of your examples highlight exactly what the OP was talking about, that employees are not paid based on the value they produce. In both examples, some employer stands to make much more value off of someone's labor than what they will pay that employee. Businesses and capitalists are looking to gain more profit and value than what is reflected in someone's salary -- this is the way they accumulate more res…
Ah. Perhaps my point was too subtle then. More bluntly, I was trying to say that there is no ethical duty to pay employees solely based on the value they produce. If there were, markets could not function. There is no conspiracy to "divorce employee's compensation from the value they create" as otakucode states.
By definition, free trade happens because each side believes they are receiving more value than they are paying. In my example, the manure owner who pays his laborer $15 an hour and the board of directors who pays the Steve Jobsian figure $500,000 an hour both believe that what they get in return is worth more than the money they pay. This is why they enter into the transaction.
>This accumulation of wealth is typically backed by hierarchy and authority structures that maintain that the employer continues to get more value out of someone's work than the employee(s) participating in that work.And from the other side, the laborer who exchanges his time for $15 per hour and the Steve Jobsian figure who exchanges his time for $500,000 an hour both "continue to get more value out of" the money the employer is paying them than they would otherwise get out of their other options. Again, this is why they agree to exchange their time for money.
Again, this all boils down to supply and demand (plus value). If there are millions of laborers that can perform any task, the price to perform that task will always be low, no matter how much value the task ultimately generates. (I say plus value because, even if you're the only person in the world that can do something, if nobody wants that thing done (i.e. no value is created) then no one will agree to transact.)