Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 246 posts

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

#211

Post by pretoriusB »

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…

>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 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?

No, today's reality of burning out and getting the short end of the stick when the startup you worked for folds (as statistically most of them do) is much better.

You write as if startups have replaced big corporations. In fact, startups employ an insignificant number of people compared to big corporations -- and most startups just crash and burn instead of being bought for a nice sum or turning into a regular company. So the payoff is there only for a tiny minority of startup employees (and mostly, founders).

So, to rephrase your question: "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, compared to the current startup reality, in which employees are worked to the bone while rarely seeing anything for it in the vast majority of cases when the company crashes or even get shafted if the company makes it big?"

Hell, yeah.

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

#212

Post by capisce »

tptacek wrote: post #166
untog wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I did. I was lucky enough to get a job at a large organisation that is still very interesting and challenging. Not everyone can be so lucky though- startups are often doing more interesting stuff than large companies, so there's an appeal.

There is nothing wrong with the most fun jobs paying less than the most boring jobs; that's just supply and demand. For similar reasons, jobs at game studios tend to suck a lot.

There is something wrong if they demand that you work more than 40 hours a week though.

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

#213

Post by capisce »

kamaal wrote: post #207
wildgift wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an exception to the 40 hour week called comp time. You get paid for excess hours by being given paid time off. The 40 hour week is already legislated. If you work over 40 you are supposed to get overtime. Overtime needs to be requested, though - that's an important point. If you're going over 40 you're supposed to tell your boss to get permission, and the boss is supposed to say, "nah, go home." I know it doe…

>>I know it doesn't work that way. Its because as programmers we never work 40 hours productively. Quite a but of our time goes in procrastinating, reading stuff on sites like HN, Facebooking etc. There fore there is almost an untold understanding that 40 hours is not to be taken literally.

Well, the article quotes research saying that knowledge workers only have six good hours in them. They need to fill the rest of the time somehow to not go insane.

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

#214

Post by capisce »

leftnode wrote: post #25
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 did at a previous job. It was a small web development shop owned by a husband and wife, and around 7 employees. I was the lead developer there and getting bored with the work. I proposed that I work 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and be paid 60% of my salary. I spent Tuesday and Thursday working on my side projects. Eventually the company went out of business, but I had great success with working part ti…

Were you actually only 60 % as productive? Otherwise it seems like a bad deal.

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

#215

Post by digitalengineer »

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 did. I've been working 36 hours a week for design agency for the past few years. Having a good planning and team is key. The law here in the Netherlands was changed so a boss couldn't say 'no' when you asked to work (a bit) less. Now it's my afternoon to arrange all sorts of stuff and to go out and play with my kid.

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

#218

Post by marbletiles »

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…

> 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?

Depends. Do you value the worth of your activity purely by personal income gained and count every minute in dollars? (Ah, you're a lawyer. Ignore that question.) In many of the cases we're talking about, the faithful employee's long-term reward is achieving things they could never have attained on their own.

> it takes laws to do that and laws restrict freedom.

Yes, the freedom to abuse employees, in this case. Restrict away.

> do tech professionals really want to be prohibited from making such choices for themselves?

Painting this as a choice is wholly disingenuous. If "the 40hr week is forever gone", in what sense is it a choice to work those hours?

> 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.

This scaremongering is, in my view, yet more of the short-sighted knee-jerk sky-will-fall nonsense employers always trot out when employee rights are discussed. Which is a) never borne out by the results when the rights are enforced and b) why they have to be enforced.

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

#219

Post by wildgift »

liber8 wrote: post #130
king_jester wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

smh... that doesn't jibe with reality. Reality is that there are different people, with varied skills, and the economy demands different people and skills at different times, in different places. There are barriers of culture, race, language, gender, national border, laws, family, and so forth.
Post reply on HN