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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

#201

Post by Nursie »

pvdm wrote: post #148
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.

Brooks' was at IBM, they adhere to a 37.5 hours per week work schedule. Programmers who can produce 3-4 hours of real work per day are considered productive. Any more and you will start to burn them out.

We stuck to 37 when I was there, so everyone could take off a little early on a Friday.

I mean officially I was there 37, it was a good week if I was doing real, actual work for 20. Yes, I made up for it by working my tail off when it was needed.

We coders can be absurdly productive for short bursts, or be slow and steady. You can't have massively productive and steady for very long. In your early 20s you have a few years of this, but the more you push it then the more jaded you'll be later.

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

#202

Post by Nursie »

jdietrich wrote: post #92

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They gre…

"We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people)"

I'm doing that short-term, directly for cash at the moment. Then I'm going to take a month off.

Most of my working life (12 years so far) has been working at the 37 hour mark, mostly because that's what was asked of me at work. There might have been some benefit in working longer hours voluntarily, but I would not have been directly compensated for them and I have a life to live outside of work.

I know this is the privilege of the skilled European tech-worker, and thank god I am one.

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

#203

Post by scotty79 »

ekianjo wrote: post #23
Zigurd wrote: post #2

Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.

> what will likely be a post-labor world Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world. You will see that there is a strong relationship…

You can see transition to post-labor world in observing growth of the labor force paid with tax money (lots of them doing unnecessary or things harmful to others), growth of prison population (these are the people who are provided for because they couldn't get jobs), increase in percentage of people working in services, increase in number of lawyers...

We are moving away from doing anything useful and we are now even running out of excuses that could entitle us to getting some money to provide for ourselves.

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

#205

Post by ctdonath »

samstave wrote: post #108
ctdonath wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on $10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range). If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-start…

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)…

Step one, grasshopper: MOVE.

If you refuse to leave, then we cannot get on to the next lesson of choosing cheap, even free, real estate.

But, like the koan of the full cup...

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

samstave wrote: post #110
burntsushi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week) Bad assumption. > If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle? What is "subsistence" about it? I understand subsistence living to mean "having just enough to survive."

Jesus, you and ctdonath sound like 20-something morons. Get a fucking life with several mortgages and children. Or, better yet - go live the idolized life of the genius software development hermit you both appear to think yourself to be. What a wonderful life that will be. I am so sick of these douchebag HNers that all think of themselves to be the next rails revolution and have no fucking clue as to what it actually…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by icebraining »

vidarh wrote: post #197
javert wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proper role of the government is to protect citizens from the initiation of force, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was certainly that. I'm not advocating anarchism.

If you believe this, do you also believe in minimising government enforcement of private property rights? I ask, because this argument about the "proper role" of government tends to start growing all kinds of exceptions that expand the role of government the moment someone starts taking it to its logical conclusion and argues for removing protections of exclusive access and use of land in particular, as a means of ma…

artificial monopolies

That's where you'll get disagreements; your reasoning doesn't apply if the exclusive access and use of land isn't considered an artificial monopoly. Particularly, 'artificial' is usually defined as something man-made, yet property rights are extremely common among other animals as well, even if they haven't developed a moral framework to justify them.

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

#208

Post by userulluipeste »

muoncf wrote: post #173
ctdonath wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on $10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range). If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-start…

I'm honestly curious about this since, even as a student, I'm living on more than that per day. Could you tell me more?

I've found a while ago an article - "eating healthily for $3 a day" (googe it). I found it to be a very interesting read (and an inspiring business idea, BTW). If you start there, you'll get $7/day left for other needs.

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

#209

Post by InclinedPlane »

shin_lao wrote: post #171
mark_l_watson wrote: post #114

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. I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation. My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to l…

Err... 20 hours is really not a lot of work. Some problems, to be solved, require intense work. At 40 hours a week you will hardly feel "burned out".

If it's 20 hours of time-on-task while in flow it's a TREMENDOUS amount of work in a knowledge worker job. We should all be so lucky to be so productive every week.

A lot of people's time is filled by very low-productive work such as excessive communication overhead, or fiddling around with low-quality tooling, etc.

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

#210

Post by yummyfajitas »

ruswick wrote: post #103
jdietrich wrote: post #92

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities. My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They gre…

My life has exhibited at various points a preponderance of the issues that your grandparents faced. Most people I know still cope with issues mentioned above. I'm not sure why you believe that poverty has vanished even among people on minimum wage: it has absolutely not.

Depends on your definition of poverty. Poverty in the sense of the aforementioned grandparents has - only a fraction of a % of the population of the US lacks indoor plumbing.

In the US, people with earned income consume $23k/year.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

By the standards of the past, poverty more or less has vanished. We just raised the bar for poverty so that we have someone to feel sorry for.

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