Can we have the day off? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can we have the day off?

#131

Post by BoorishBears » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

9991 wrote: post #106

bigbuppo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.

Sounds like the AI should get 36x the current pay. It's not as if the employee is bringing that to the table.

Oof, having a skillset so pedestrian that any incremental gain in efficiency needs to be kicked upwards must be tough.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#132

Post by majormajor » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

kbar13 wrote: post #78

Cakez0r wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.

There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.

"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#133

Post by ikr678 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #100

cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for t…

Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.

Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#134

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #65

The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose. It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it. The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, a…

Alright guys, I'm running for president. 4 day work weeks (8 hours each) for employees or prison.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#135

Post by hx8 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #44

Best the powers that be can do is increase outsourcing since a 15$ an hour engineer + ai is most of the way to a 70$ an hour engineer + ai. If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year

Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#136

Post by lmm » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

themanmaran wrote: post #71

lmm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.

Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products. And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.

> The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.

Either the product was 10x better, which I don't think I need, or it wasn't really a 10x increase in productivity.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#137

Post by whatshisface » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:37 AM UTC

qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #122

whatshisface wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for t…

I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead. We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends…

The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#138

Post by satvikpendem » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

chipsrafferty wrote: post #67

cmuguythrow wrote: post #39

Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to…

Did you just link to a rat website as if that is a good source?

A rat website? What does this mean, I'm out of the loop with SSC?

Re: Can we have the day off?

#139

Post by dozerly » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

hx8 wrote: post #117

madrox wrote: post #65

The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose. It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it. The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, a…

By this logic you could get promoted if you worked six day work weeks.

And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things

Re: Can we have the day off?

#140

Post by majormajor » Thu, May 28, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #126

majormajor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place. If everyone sufficiently "flips out…

The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.

>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.

How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).

Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.