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

221–230 of 246 posts

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

#221

Post by fholm »

Again I love my country (Sweden). There are multiple laws in place that forbid companies to force people to work more then X hours per week/month/year.

There's several different averages across days, weeks and months that control how much "overtime" you're allowed to work. The max is 200 hours per year though.

It obviously varies, and not everyone follows these laws, especially in (game) development, etc. As long as you the employee agrees to working over time (often uncompensated) none is going to bat an eye. The important thing is that you have a law that will back you up incase your company is trying to force you.

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

#223

Post by eli_gottlieb »

wildgift wrote: post #201
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 only exempt jobs are in management, and in very well-paid programming jobs. I don't know the amount, but I imagine it's six figures or nearly that. Sysadmins and programmers who don't get overtime are having their wages stolen, basically. Unfortunately, the amount of ignorance (or denial) about this is widespread, so many people have accepted that they will work past 40 hours and not get paid for it.

Federal law has no salary requirements at all for exempting programmers. California law adds one, at $81,000/year -- which is simply not that much in Silicon Valley terms!

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

#224

Post by eli_gottlieb »

crusso wrote: post #91
Joeri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this sentence from that article: "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour.". You cannot work double the hours and be more productive. If you work 80 hours on a continual basis, you will get less done than if you worked 40 hours. I have seen smart people reduced to blubbering idiots by the hours they…

You cannot work double the hours and be more productive You can't simply put typical workers on a schedule that's twice as long and expect more productivity, that's true. Individually, though, you can normally become extraordinarily more productive if you have the right motivation. people working crazy hours succeed. Why is this such a mystery? Haven't you ever thrown yourselves into a new startup or idea and spent e…

Passion leaves a nasty hangover of bugs. I've gotten jazzed on Vietnamese coffee and hacked my compiler all through the night and into the morning on a Friday night.

I then had to spend the next several days fixing all the damn bugs I'd put in because I wasn't thinking straight.

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

#225

Post by crusso »

_delirium wrote: post #105
crusso wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, swa…

US and Scandinavia

Notice that I mentioned cultural diversity. There is a reason that Scandanavia can manage with a more socialistic government. The gene/meme pool is far less diverse and evolutionarily created reinforcement of good communal practices are already present. A thousand years ago and beyond, if you didn't grok cooperation and thoughtful planning, you starved and died come winter.

Scandanavia is like a petri dish with a thriving germ culture that has had very little exposure to many other competing germ cultures. It's easy to point to that little petri dish and say, "See how well this culture thrives?"

We don't have that luxury in the USA. Here, we deal with many self-interested gene/meme contributors who are more self-interested than community-interested. If we implemented the government and laws of Norway here in the US tomorrow, we would collapse. Too many here would take the free government support as a right and live off of it until the whole system failed.

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

#226

Post by crusso »

squarecat wrote: post #97
crusso wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, for the sake of discussion, why wouldn't your big red button pusher take home a majority of the profits? Without them, what do you have? As I understand it, your scenario is how unions justify their continued existence. (If you're not already an American Republican, you really should look into it. trollolol...)

Without them, what do you have?

You just hire another shlep who can wake up on time to hit the red button. If you can't find a reliable person to hit the button for you, you do the R&D to automate it.

As I understand it, your scenario is how unions justify their continued existence.

You're reading an argument that I didn't make.

If you're not already an American Republican

I'm a libertarian. I believe that if all you can do is hit a button then you shouldn't be surprised that no one wants to pay you very much. You also shouldn't be offended when your job is truthfully characterized as "just hitting a big red button in the morning".

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

#227

Post by thirdtruck »

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.

At the same time, we require an inordinate amount of "back of mind" processing time in order to perform so much problem solving.

In other words, "the code's compiling" explanation for idling covers the linking up of modules in the code and in our brains' mental models of it.

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

#228

Post by thirdtruck »

Tycho wrote: post #92
EliRivers wrote: post #73

I read this title and thought it was a demand to increase the working work. Work 40 hours per week? Is that some kind of joke? Then I read the comments and was quietly horrified. I'm guessing a long long working week is a U.S. thing.

I think they include lunch hours in the 40 hour count, so it's really just a nine to five monday to friday.

I have the same experience as abracadaniel above: the hour count excludes lunches.

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

#229

Post by freehunter »

capisce wrote: post #212
tptacek wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's debatable. Are they paying you for more than 40 hours? If your employer demands you work more than 40 hours per week, that's what the job there will entail. Not much different than the details of their culture or health plan. It's just another thing the employer expects. Like with everything in your career, if this doesn't match up with what you want out of the job, you're working at the wrong place.

If my employer demanded a tie and I didn't want to dress that fancy, then there's a disconnect between their expectations and mine. We don't fit together well. Some people will like working 50, 60, even 80 hours per week. Some won't. The people who should be employed there are the ones who like what that company has to offer them as the whole package.

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

#230

Post by hudibras »

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 ...

The 4% figure you hear about (usually in the "early retirement" circles) includes drawing down your principal gradually over time. Don't remember the numbers exactly, but drawing 4% of your initial nest-egg each year is supposed to give a 95% chance that your savings will last 40 years. Add in Social Security benefits kicking in at age 67 and that percentage goes up to 100% in most cases (unless you have an insanely large nest egg).
Post reply on HN