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Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

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Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#121

Post by sdk16420 »

hnews_account_1 wrote: post #96
devmor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing. Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limitin…

White collar work in the modern era is also very unrestricted. I can slack off during most of the day if I want (and nothing urgent comes up) and my manager will neither check nor care. Because of 24/7 systems, I can completely bunk fridays while pretending to work from home and just staying online from the phone. It is totally irrelevant to my job. I hate fridays and usually work Sunday to Thursday in reality. Many…

I feel that we are employed above of all to be available when it matters rather than to do a certain amount of work for the hours you are paid for. Compare it to a workshop with some tools, you buy a hammer not because you use it for 8 hours a day, but because when you need it, you can't do without it. If you go a day without needing to use the hammer, it doesn't mean that having the hammer in your shed is a waste of money.

If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#122

Post by Auracle »

willio58 wrote: post #95
MEMORYC_RRUPTED wrote: post #7

This won't be valid for everyone, but I'm getting more and more convinced that most (a lot of?) people don't "work" work 40 hours anyway. I'm not even mentally capable of doing 40 intense hours of focussed work. Not saying I don't have other tasks besides coding/thinking in that time, but honestly not for the full slot of time. It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but…

This is why Remote is great. You have the flexibility, and as long as you get the work you say you'll get done done, who cares if you're literally sitting in a chair from 9-5?

Which is exactly how salaried work was supposed to work, not “40 hours is the minimum and we won’t pay you if we pile so much work on that you need to work 60 hours instead.”

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#123

Post by erinaceousjones »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #22
socialismisok wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the workers produce as much (or more) in that arrangement.

more is never enough in the capitalist system

This makes the assumption that capitalism exists in a vacuum: It doesn't. Companies aren't *always* trying to simply optimise for financial growth at all times. They're made of humans, some of whom aren't necessarily megacapitalists.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#125

Post by idontpost »

robertlagrant wrote: post #24
pwinnski wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do companies pay for people to work "only" five days each week? Or "only" 40 hours? Why not seven days, and 84 hours each week? Surely there are people willing to work those hours for even less than companies are paying now, eliminating the deadweight loss. Once you have the answer to that question, the answer to your question seems very straightforward.

The answer is that both parties have agreed that 40 hours of work a week is worth that much money. And if there are people already willing to work 84 hours for less money then they would be employed already for less at 40 hours.

No post body was provided.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#127

Post by thewebcount »

dustedcodes wrote: post #28
Tyrek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we "actually work" 32 hours out of 40 (80%), what is the likelihood that if we shift to a 32 hour max week, that the average person will only "actually work" ~26 hours (80% of 32) in this hypothetical future? What if at least part of the 20% is spent doing social activities, water cooler conversations, etc. that enable the remaining 80% to flow more efficiently?

Reduce the hours in the day. Most people structure their days based on what they want to accomplish (goal driven), rather than how to spread out work evenly across a fixed number of hours (time driven). So if someone knows that they are expected to deliver task A + B in one day then they will do it. If they have a 4 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then happily clock off. If they have to do it in an 8 hour…

Given what I've seen during the pandemic, I'd think that part of the reason people feel overwhelmed is related to commutes. Getting an extra hour back in my day made me feel better. I'm not sure if working 5 days a week, but only 6.333... hours would have the same effect as working 8 hours a day for 4 days a week where you also have one less hour of commute time per day. On the 5th day, if you don't go into work, you don't just have 8 fewer hours of work, you also have 1 fewer hour of commuting.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#128

Post by OkayPhysicist »

_cenw wrote: post #51
mc32 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree we don't put in a full 40 hours. Unless someone is working a 1950's style assembly line (meatpacking plant for example) few will put in those 40 hours even in manual labor ---you're chatting, playing around, etc. for some time. White collar work, is of course, way worse. There is a lot of slack time in between tasks and meetings and so on. So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units.…

My pace of work is burn myself out in the first 1-2 hours of every day and then procrastinate / go to meetings. I'm so happy to be out of the office. Being able to work whenever works for me (and my ADHD brain) has probably given me at least 50% more output on average. Hours don't mean anything to me and nobody has ever complained about my work pace (rather the opposite). Pretending to be busy in an office was tortur…

Ugh. I do the opposite, as I am VERY much not a morning person, so I spend the first hour or two each day just fighting to appear awake. But then get enough done in my peak couple hours after lunch that I run out of work to do.

Wish the promise of "Salaried means we pay for the job to be done" ideal was more of a reality.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#129

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ITB wrote: post #35
newbYhrly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk posted screens of his Elden Ring progress a couple weeks after launch. Given other players had to sink 60-80 hours in to get to the same point Musk was broadcasting, he was working 48 hours a day at his companies and on Elden Ring. Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week. Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been pr…

Picasso offered a drawing in a napkin for $1M dollars, even though it took him 1 min to draw it. You know the gist. Bezos might do 20 hours a week of “work” because he scaffolded a giant organization around his brain, so he only needs to provide certain input. Besides, much of the non-work time, such as public speaking and so forth, is actually work. Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real con…

That's a power balance issue far more than a fairness argument.

If my boss is happy to pay this amount for my level of work output, why should it matter whether I'm spending 40 hours or 4 doing it? In fact, to suggest otherwise is downright Marxist, asserting that the value of my labor is the time I spent doing it, rather than the value someone else is willing to pay.

Do you subscribe to the labor theory of value for goods, or just people?

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#130

Post by somenameforme »

newbYhrly wrote: post #115
somenameforme wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos parents were teenagers of no significant means. After they divorced, his mother married an "uneducated" (in the sense he had not attended college) Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos, again of no significant means. After Miguel graduated from the elite University of New Mexico, they moved to Houston so he could work for Exxon. During high school Jeff took on an elite internship working the morning shift at McDonalds.…

You stopped short of detailing the well documented part of 50 people chipping in 25k. That alone is a testament to how the country has changed. How many McDonalds burger flippers have that social network now? His childhood and his family greatly benefited from pre-Reagan social programs. How sad if the mega-mega-billionaires were mega-mega-millionaires. The rich of their childhood got through high taxes ok. If such t…

He didn't found Amazon in high school. Instead, alongside working at McDonalds, he also graduated valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and so on. He then graduated from Princeton (almost certainly on a full ride scholarship), and again graduated near the top of his class (a member of both Phi Kappa Beta and Tau Beta Pi) with degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. From there he worked for 8 more years until he set upon founding Amazon.
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