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Is 40 hours a week too much?

okta.com

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Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#101

Post by thakoppno »

swyx wrote: post #73
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Great blog post. Does Okta have a four day work week yet? https://www.4dayweek.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/16/four-day-workweek-is-new-sta...

yeah i was very surprised to see this on an okta domain. you probably shouldn’t be putting out posts like these unless you’re literally announcing a 4 day work week

okta may have among the best datasets to measure work at tech cos.

some days it seems like my job at tech co is to authenticate.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#103

Post by s1artibartfast »

I think the most important step towards flexible work hours in the US is decoupling health benefits from employers. Currently these benefits are essentially a flat cost per worker, and an incentive to squeeze the most out of each person.

If the two were decoupled, employees would more easily be able to adjust their work hours to their personal desires. If you want to work 20 hours per half pay, great. If you want to work 60 hours for 50% more, great.

Individual desires and needs very greatly among people, so such a system would allow a wider variety of people too meet their needs

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#105

Post by zip1234 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #57
daneel_w wrote: post #28

In my early 20s when I worked as an electrician I never felt that 40 hour long weeks were too much. Working as a programmer I definitely feel that it is way too much. The head (mine at least) really needs a lot more time to recuperate.

Yeah, 40/week in restaurants or a trade really was a breeze. Most of the time you wanted to put in minimum 40 to get benefits.

Working construction, when I was wasn't there I wasn't thinking about my job at all. Once I left the jobsite I was free.

I know it is different if you are managing a job, but as an average worker it was not too bad.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#106

Post by heavyset_go »

varjag wrote: post #86
heavyset_go wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your great great grandfather from your anecdote worked during/after the Industrial Revolution. Historical evidence shows that people worked much less than they did during and after the Industrial Revolution[1]. [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Herding sheep didn't change dramatically with Industrial Revolution.

It did, considering much of the pasture lands and commons traditionally used by herders were enclosed, along with economics changing in order for people to afford things like taxes, rents/mortgages, and goods that were once made at home, or by craftsmen, that were now factory-produced and sold via commodity markets. Those economic changes necessitate the creation of surplus value to be sold in markets for money versus doing just enough work for subsistence.

You can see this change with the tenant farmer model. Traditional use of the commons was eliminated by privatization, and farmers then had to rent back smaller plots of land to sustain themselves. Tenant farmers now had rents to pay, so they had to create a surplus of value in order to afford that rent, and could no longer just engage in the subsistence farming they had done in the past, which meant doing more work.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#108

Post by wizofaus »

The question is with all these trial projects where organisations and even apparently entire countries experimented with shorter working weeks, is that despite the results consistently demonstrating the benefits, why in no case did it stick? (*) How long did it take for the 40-hour week to become almost universally established after the initial trials? I'm definitely in favour of a trend towards a 4 day week (or even a 9 day fortnight), but I don't think I could ever be totally comfortable being the only guy in the office to do so (esp. if I expected to be paid the same amount!).

(*) I'm similarly curious about UBI pilots!

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#109

Post by manmal »

hulitu wrote: post #42
mkl95 wrote: post #7

Many companies think their employees are being productive for 40 hours a week, while it's actually somewhere between 10 and 20, with the rest being a big void. If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell.

I heard Elon does 120 hours a week. /s I haven't seen anyone doing 40 hours a week. At least not more than a week.

I once worked real 60-70h weeks, ca 4 weeks nonstop in order to meet a critical deadline. Probably took three days off in that timeframe. I basically slouched in the living room all day and hacked away, surviving on chocolate and nootropics. Can’t recommend this, at all! My body tenses whenever I think about that, three years later, and I never wanna do that again.

Re: Is 40 hours a week too much?

#110

Post by interstice »

orblivion wrote: post #55
interstice wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freelance web developer background currently developer / business owner - my achievable baseline is 30 hours of billed out time and around 10 hours of admin/emails/meetings etc. Keeping the emails from eating the rest is an ongoing battle though.

Do you not charge for meetings? And what about emails where you're hashing out something clearly in the domain of what you're working on?

It depends on the meetings (and the email), if its directly related to a project it can fall under project management but a lot of them end up being internal comms or estimating for minor jobs that might not be approved etc.
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