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We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

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Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#151

Post by svachalek »

judgardner wrote: post #78
bluedanieru wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is ? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain. Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'…

> Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty. Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#... edi: linked wrong chart

GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#152

Post by pvdm »

xtracto wrote: post #123
samstave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK - I am your student I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF. Show me how to live on $10/day. Consider me your student. Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled "show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how to subsist on $10/day" If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to get to work ($7.10, BTW)…

>If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live. Wow, HN has dropped this low? Here were I live the standard household income is around $600 USD a Month. A family of 4 can (parents and two children) can live with that.

Where would that be?

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#153

Post by svachalek »

tossacct wrote: post #87
bluedanieru wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is ? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain. Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'…

>>>Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain. What is the proper proportion?

Why not 1:1?

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#154

Post by zurn »

__--__ wrote: post #143
zurn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power. Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS (the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days) Note how the wel…

Considering I just spend the last month putting in 80+ hour weeks along with all of my co-workers, might I humbly suggest you put "n=1" after your post? Then again, I work in video games. Long hours are the industry standard.

I hope the 80 hour standard doesn't spread to the rest of the world, lest the games biz loses all the talented workforce with any sense ;)

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#155

Post by Volpe »

samstave wrote: post #74
michaelochurch wrote: post #42

25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even. Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects. The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicate…

I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living" We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/w…

> We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions

Should we? Is that the ultimate goal here? The problem with trying to tell people what their life is about, is that you are wrong as soon as you start.

> how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?

Subsistence is 'surviving' (like, not dying, not not unable to pay rent).

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#156

Post by svachalek »

mattschoch wrote: post #21
bertzzie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. I think it's mostly physical jobs that 70 year olds cannot perform well. And that kind of job can be automated by robots anyway. For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.

>>For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds. Maybe in 50 years, but currently I'd say a 20-30 years old is the prime programmer age. Young people tend to learn new tech quicker, and be faster/more efficient at typing and using computers.

...typing and using computers? So you're comparing 20-30 year old programmers with 40 year old people who aren't even comfortable with computers? Yeah, I'd say apples are way better than oranges.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#157

Post by seanmcdirmid »

svachalek wrote: post #142
jseliger wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc. Take a look at Brooks' The Mythical Man Month for data that demonstrates the opposite, at least in programming; I haven't followed the field closely, but education and industrial organization researchers have done similar work in other professions.

1. That was about 40 years ago when the waterfall process was state of the art. Modern, iterative processes are much more flexible. 2. The loss of productivity levels off as the team size increases. Going from 50 to 100 developers is not the same as 1 to 2. All said, I expect some loss of productivity is inevitable due to context switching and communication overhead but it isn't necessarily a major loss.

In software, there is still economy in scale of a person's time. Throwing more people on a project is still detrimental even if you use something like Agile. It is a major loss.

The easy way to combat this is to have longer timelines for projects, or, if necessary, crunch periods followed by more relaxed recharge periods.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#158

Post by bertzzie »

mikecane wrote: post #12
bertzzie wrote: post #3

This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day. I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.

>>>working 60 hours a week is the norm What kind of labor is that? White collar or factory assembly?

Almost every job. From factory assembly to designer / programmers, you are usually expected to work around 9 - 10 hours a day, including saturdays. Some big enterprises like banks have start to give us 8 hours weekday work time, but most still not there yet.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#159

Post by bertzzie »

zht wrote: post #8
bertzzie wrote: post #3

This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day. I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.

do you have extremely long days but 5 days a week or do you spread it out over 6 or 7 days?

We spread it out over 6 days, but still around 9 - 10 hours a day. Still longer than avarage 8 hours in most first world countries I think?

As I said above, some big enterprises like bank have started to give 8 hours weekday work time, but most company haven't.

Re: We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

#160

Post by afterburner »

bluedanieru wrote: post #61
ekianjo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them, to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same time? :) Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not res…

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is ? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain. Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'…

Actually, the wealth has accrued quite nicely to the top 1%, even more so to the top 0.01%. Whereas the rest of the population has seen real pay flatline as you say. That is the real problem.
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