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

Post by mpeg » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 1:10 AM UTC

latortuga wrote: post #35

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 moti…

Post by lutorm » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

gwern wrote: post #116

marvin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

The Norwegian fund also has a investment horizon better measured in centuries, not years, so it can afford to to wait out the huge stock market fluctuations in the expectation of that average return. A mere human, on the other hand...

Post by biscarch » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 1:32 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #143

grellas wrote: post #127

The 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 t…

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 You think startups are any different? Unless you are one of the very first employees in a startup that is massively successful, you're not going to benefit financially compared to a job at BigCorp. In fact, the loss of hi…

Post by untog » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 1:44 AM UTC

dlss wrote: post #154

untog wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 You think startups are any different? Unless you are one of the very first employees in a startup that is massively successful, you're not going to benefit financially compared to a job at BigCorp. In fact, the loss of hi…

Why not just leave for a job at BigCorp?

Post by stephen_g » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 1:48 AM UTC

jeffool wrote: post #30

jonsen wrote: post #10

I 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 som…